Bob Sanchez’ BS

I’ve been reading a lot about food and the food industry lately, and months ago I decided to grow some food on my own once I arrived in Tokyo.

Unfortunately, I allowed a lot of great planting season go by without doing anything, but I finally got off my duff and bought seeds, soil, and planters for the balcony. I’m starting off with baby lettuce and Japanese mustard greens, called komatsuna in the native tongue.

While reading up on balcony garden techniques, I ran into this video about harvesting honey by Kirk Anderson of Backwards Beekeepers.

This is fun and exciting stuff! I like Anderson’s homey persona and how in touch he is with the bees as living beings and not honey-making machines.

If the seed packages are to be believed, I’m about 35 days away from enjoying a Tokyo Balcony Salad. Hopefully, I can continue making my own salads, and someday I’ll be able to glop a little backyard honey onto ‘em.

I’d like to say that I haven’t been adding to this site because I’ve been busy, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. I haven’t had any time to do it in the last two weeks, but I wasted all of my free time for the month or so before that.

I fell asleep at the wheel in Kochi. Baseball responsibilities were limited, but I still had the business card and the fun stories, so I talked a lot of scouting without doing much of it.

My students finished their final exams at the end of January and I had nothing to do at school for a month and a half. Rather than spend time churning out stories for the site and looking around for better work, I sat at my desk and read about baseball on the Internet all day. Not quite a waste of time, but hugely inefficient. I realized that there’s a lot of stuff out there and that nobody has time to keep up with all of it.

Rain washed out a lot of early morning bike rides, but I rolled over and went back to sleep just as many times on dry mornings. I did set some personal records on my frequent routes, but I could have gotten after it more often and more consistently.

For months now I’ve been considering trying to earn money by doing freelance translating through online agencies, and I got great tips from that older woman and other members of the translator’s association that I joined.

They gave me a website with a list of 300 agencies; all I had to do was make a cover letter, slap my resume onto an email with the letter, and copy and paste a bunch of email addresses. But every time I sat down to do it, I’d take a look at the first agency on the list and freeze up. Then I’d make myself a sandwich or start writing emails or polish my shoes.

My piano sat in my room collecting dust, and I hardly even played at school. The longer I wait to practice and get timing and technique back, the harder it will be to do.

In sum, I sat around all winter becoming one-dimensional and collecting teaching paychecks. I let everything stagnate and there were no signs of awakening until I got an unexpected call from the Good English Company.

They lost the contract to the Evil English Company. To continue teaching, I’d have to take a pay cut and spend more time sitting in the office during testing and non-school periods under Evil English’s ridiculous policies.

That was the kick in the pants that I needed. I went straight home and applied to ten translation agencies, thinking I’d hit all 300 eventually and receive a handful of responses. Nine of those first ten responded, and suddenly I was busy sending samples and filling out employment forms.

I talked out the situation with whoever would listen – I wanted to do freelance translating and scout more. I could wake up early and bike for a few hours not having to worry about being somewhere at 8:30. I could translate as much or as little as I wanted to, taking work on the road for the baseball trips. This was a chance to live an exciting, free life!

Of course, my favorite people had something else to say about that. I got on the horn with Immigration and they advised against the move, saying that I would have to prove that I could make a living translating and that I had a good reason to be in Japan to do it. I still had to keep scouting income a secret, so I faced the very real prospect of losing my privilege to live in Japan if I tried to make the jump right away.

That was fine with me, because I knew that not having the security of the teaching income would force me to fight for my life with translating. My baseball employers also said that they would find a way to keep me working in Japan, even if I had to fly in for a few long business trips every year.

I was ready to tell Evil English where to shove its contract when someone reminded me that I can’t ignore the worldwide economic situation. To be completely honest, I hear the gloom and doom but don’t really see or feel any of it. The economy is always depressed in Kochi. I don’t owe anybody any money or own anything that was valuable. I’m at least 40 years away from retirement. I live on the cheap whether times are good or bad.

I thought over all of the scenarios I could imagine and decided that it would be too risky to jump now. To be a successful freelance translator, you have to have work, and I’ve heard more translators say that the amount of work is dwindling than the other way around. On top of that, I don’t know if I’m any good at it yet!

I place a high value on being in Japan and being able to study Japanese baseball very closely. The worst-case scenario if I try to make the jump now puts me in the States on a part-time scouting salary and not much else.

Teaching for another year will be frustrating and will turn the screws on my scouting time, and I’ve got to find time to try translating to build something up for next year. However, I think the guarantee that I will be here ready to see players and show my face around baseball warrants another year at the status quo.

The baseball boss has talked about stepping up the club’s commitment to me, and I may even have a visa through an agreement with a Japanese team before the year is over, rendering all of this moot. I can always quit teaching mid-year.

So, I’m not making as bold a move as I’d like to, but I am awake and feel more like myself than I did during the winter, when I was in hibernation. I know where everyone stands and simply have to wait to see where the pieces fall and do my best at my work in the meantime.

While casually thumbing through a monthly community newsletter, I stumbled across an outdoor cooking event to be held at none other than mystical Castle Mountain.

I did eventually and successfully navigate the inner roads of Castle Mountain once, although like beating Super Mario Bros. the first time, I wasn’t sure if I could do it again.

This time, the Kochi Youth Association offered to drive twenty 15- to 30-year-olds up the mountain on a Sunday morning in October for a short hike and a lunch consisting of mountain cuisine.

The day arrived, and with it torrential rains. I called up the fellow at KYA and he said that there was a Plan B and to come on down.

I invited Noodles, an English teacher from Massachusetts who lives to the east of Kochi City and who once consumed 159 bowls of soba noodles in succession.

About 15 folks our age showed up, and we piled into two vans and headed up the crooked road that wraps around Castle Mountain. The rain was practically coming up from the ground, it was falling so hard.

We arrived at a small building on the main road of a tiny town perched on a hillside. Across the street was a post office, a fire station, and an elementary school, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all in the same building. Sheets of rain prevented me from taking a closer look.

It was at this community center that we met Mountain Main, a swarthy, wiry Japanese man in his fifties who had grown up deep in the Shikoku Mountain Range and knew everything there was to know about…well, the Shikoku Mountain Range.

Tough as a hunk of beef jerky yet gentle and grandfatherly, Mountain Man shook our hands and told us to get back into the vans – we couldn’t hike in the rain, but dammit, we could drive!

We hopped out at a familiar place to me, it was one of those devilish crossroads that had given me fits in Quest for Castle Mountain. Mountain Man scrambled up the glistening black cliff, and for the first time, I realized that it was a rather unique rock formation with sparse vegetation compared to the rest of the scene.

He told us that it was rock from deep within the Earth, jarred loose and thrust into the Kochi landscape by periodic earthquakes. It was of the right quality for a certain kind of concrete and was beneficial to a few specific types of plants, the names, functions, and even tastes of which he knew by heart.

There was a story for every plant, and I was overwhelmed by the breadth of his knowledge. I blurred my focus and looked at the cliff, and at the dirt hillsides surrounding it – just hills with plants, I thought. If I had had to guess, I would have said that all of the plants were the same.

Not so for Mountain Man. He knew which plants to eat, which not to even touch, and which to strip the bark off of and sell to Japanese paper makers. He was like Willy Wonka and Castle Mountain and the Shikoku Range were his chocolate factory.

His eyes danced and he spoke at a rapid pace, and it was evident that his mind was moving faster than his mouth allowed. I detected traces of a mountain accent and would have loved the chance to hear him and a farmer go at it, though I probably wouldn’t have understood a single word.

We squeezed back into the vans, all of us dripping wet by that time, and the vans strained to carry us up to the peak. We encountered a fallen tree blocking the road, and none of the guys in the group had to be told twice to jump out of the vans and push it away.

Finally, we reached the “parking lot” close to the top, which barely had room for the two vans and called for some creative parking. On the small summit, we looked down at nothing but bright, gray rainclouds.

It was a shame, because Mountain Man knew about the centuries-old castle ruins and abandoned prison visible from the peak. He also told us about fault lines and old city and town boundaries that he could have shown us on a better day.

The geography geek in me really wants to go back and scale Castle Mountain for a look at these things, but I’ve made it up there myself and didn’t see them before, so the budding cyclist in me is refusing.

Mountain Man found some mushrooms and began to explain the ways he could tell if they were tasty or even edible. I was taken with the way he handled them, the pale, white caps flailing about in his brown hands as he raved about the risks and rewards of mushroom hunting.

I’m not sure if I only imagined him taking a bite of one and continuing to educate with probably-poisonous-but-maybe-not-let’s-see mushroom spilling out of his mouth.

It was a great chance to hear a Japanese person speak about a subject other than baseball with real expertise. Rare is the opportunity to take on the challenge of deciphering alien words and concepts in addition to processing information that is new regardless of language or culture.

Since Mountain Man was schooling us all on rocks and plants and using terminology that none of us knew, the foreigner/Japanese lines melted away as much as they ever will. We were all students becoming enlightened and that was what mattered most. I enjoyed that situation very much and should seek out opportunities like it more often.

Noodles and I kept the ball rolling once we returned to the community center and set up the tarps and cooking equipment. Everyone was in a great mood despite the pouring rain, and we were determined to enjoy a cooking lesson from Mountain Man. That made it easy to maintain the flow of conversation and make sure that everyone was a part of it.

At a few times it became necessary for me to say something to Noodles or vice versa, and we surprised ourselves by keeping it in Japanese. That allowed us to be courteous to everyone else without disturbing the speed and momentum of the conversation.

We’ve talked with each other about how much we dislike hearing non-native Japanese speakers speak Japanese. I can’t stand it because very few people pronounce things correctly or attempt to make it sound Japanese. Noodles has an extensive vocabulary and impeccable command of grammar, and he doesn’t like wading in the kiddie pool.

Yet this is the second time that we’ve hit the override button on speaking to each other in Japanese, and each time it made sense as we were in front of other Japanese. If we’re willing to beat our swords into plowshares over this, we actually make a pretty good team – he always knows the word that I’m looking for, and when his textbook-perfect Japanese and quirky delivery is met with quizzical looks, I’m there to help him package it better.

Noodles seems to be the right guy with which to try and let go of another piece of Marco Polo Syndrome. I’m sure that non-Japanese Japanese will always grate on my ears (even my own does, on occasion), but I must admit that I am quick to judge and compare whenever I hear a fellow barbarian speaking in tongues. Life will be better the more I simply smile and move on.

In any event, it was fantastic to meet a whole bunch of young Japanese people. One point on the negative side for Kochi is that, due to its remote location and poor economic performance compared with the rest of the country, it lacks the job opportunities and the night life that attract young people.

Many of them flee to Osaka and Tokyo right out of college, if not high school, and stay there until they have a family to raise or elderly parents to care for. I am always a bit blown away by the seeming explosion of youth that I see when I step off a train in the big cities (even Nagoya). There just aren’t that many twenty-somethings in Kochi.

Most of the participants did not know each other prior to the outdoor event, and so we all spent time telling our stories and the dearth of youth in Kochi came up several times. Many of them said that upon returning they feared they wouldn’t be able to find jobs in Kochi and that all of their other friends were long gone.

I suppose that’s why they showed up on a Sunday morning to mess around in the mountains with a bunch of people they didn’t know. After we made baskets by hand out of kudzu vine, the day ended with us sending each other our cell phone information via amazing laser technology (okay, it’s just infrared rays).

All in all, it was a very fulfilling day. Geology and botany lecture for starters, a huge pot of deer meat stew for the main dish, and a sense of belonging and fellowship on the side.

I don’t have a lot of good things to say about my time in Fukushima in 2005. It was the darkest, lowest point in my life and I didn’t have a great attitude about it.

I’m going back this winter to exorcise the demons and, as I tell people in Japanese, finally admit that I was the bad one.

I did receive a great pearl of wisdom from my boss at the time, and it came from a story he told me over some cigars on a Sunday morning.

As a kid in Hawaii, he played baseball well and enjoyed being at the top of the heap. As an older guy, he understood Japanese people very well because he remembered thinking that the world ended and began with his island. A good number of people here think that way, and let’s face it, not all islands are surrounded by water…

He exhibited that mindset in front of an old man, who pulled him aside and pointed at a bucket full of crabs that was settled in the sand a few paces away. The old man and the boy watched as crabs tried to escape from the bucket.

When one crab got a claw over the side of the bucket, the other crabs pulled it back inside. Over and over again this happened, and not one crab would escape.

“That bucket,” said the man, “is the island of Oahu. These boys you hang out with are just like those crabs. Get out of the bucket the second you have a chance.”

It was a little too simple for me to take at face value, but it was easy to imagine and I understood the lesson.

The image reminded me of that analogy of Hell where everyone is sitting at a table with a huge pot of delicious stew in the center. Everyone has a spoon with a long handle. When they try to feed themselves, they find that they can’t get the food to their mouths. They try in vain to feed themselves for eternity.

Heaven, of course, is where everybody turns to the side and feeds the person next to them with the long-handled spoon.

Back to the crabs. That little anecdote stuck with me and I find myself using it often, especially when dealing with negativity. Most recently, I pulled it out at the Kochi Driver’s License Center.

If you grab an International Driver’s License at Triple-A in the United States before you leave, you are allowed to drive in Japan for a full year from your date of entry into the country. I don’t have a car, but I’ve rented them several times in order to get to baseball games that were far enough off the beaten path to justify renting a car instead of taking a train and a cab.

I also love road trips and like to be able to contribute.

When your year is up, you either stop driving, risk getting caught without a license, or have your American license changed to a Japanese license.

This involves the headache of applying for the change at the DMV, which is just a bureaucratic and inefficient here as it is in the States. Then, you must pass a written test and a road test to make the change. Canadians, by the way, just have to fill out an application and pay a fee.

The written test is cake, ten questions that are pretty intuitive and offered in English, no less. The road test is the hard part. It takes place on a closed course that resembles Mario Kart more than it does an actual road.

There are intersections, railway crossings, and S-curves jammed into an area a shade larger than a football field. In the middle sits a four-way intersection with a traffic light, about the only thing on the course that both makes sense and is realistic.

Some intersections are marked with a number, but most are not. There are no buildings, just a couple of walls in one area that are supposed to be visual obstructions.

You must demonstrate proper scanning technique, but on the closed course you have to imagine the danger and check over your shoulder for stuff you know is not there. It’s very easy to miss checking an intersection, for example, because it doesn’t look like a real interesection (no shops or rice fields) and because you know that you’re the only one on the course.

You must drive in a car furnished by the license center for a mere $16 each time you take the test, which costs another $24. Grading is very strict and proctors are picky, and it is not unheard of for people to have to take the test as many as ten times. What a racket.

You are graded from the moment you step on the course, so if you don’t adjust your seat the proper way, you could fail. If your wheels are not close enough to the edge of the road when you make a left turn, you could fail.

It’s a rather silly way to test someone’s actual driving skills, and foreigners and Japanese alike know that, but this system is in place and it’s not going anywhere.

I signed up for a couple of driving classes at a nearby driving school to test out their course and see just how nitpicky they would be. It really helped out, and I went out to the license center certain that I had a chance at passing the first time.

An English teaching buddy was there taking it for the seventh time, and I was the only one there for the first time among five foreigners. A gloomy mood permeated the room, and I tried my best to joke with the other test-takers that I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed just because it was my first time.

A siren sounded at noon, and we were allowed to walk the course for an hour. That’s actually pretty important because they announce the course in the morning and you have to memorize it as part of your score. So an ideal test should be done in complete silence, no communciation between the proctor and the driver. You only talk to him at the beginning, and again at the end when you “get advice” on your driving.

While walking the course in a big group, the other test-takers started complaining about the ridiculousness of the whole ordeal, shuffling their feet and moving slowly. I was prepared to be frustrated and to take “advice” on something I’ve been doing for a decade with a straight face, but I was not prepared for such negativity.

I didn’t say much, and we were only able to circle the course twice together. The one o’clock siren blew and it was time to take the test. I had drawn the first straw, so I bowed to the proctor and carefully entered the car.

I did everything in the right order – check both ways, open door, get in with a hand on the steering wheel, close the door, lock it, adjust the seat, adjust the mirrors, fasten seatbelt, foot on the brake, start the car, emergency break, put it in drive, signal, check over the shoulders, check the mirrors, ask for permission to drive.

Whew! I got permission and stepped on the gas, but the car didn’t move. I hadn’t started it! I thought I had but the engine didn’t catch on and I couldn’t hear it because of the air conditioning. Nice way to start a perfect test!

I finally got that all sorted out and got onto the course. There’s a section where you have to get up to 25 MPH, which is a lot harder than it sounds because you’re coming out of a curve at less than 10 MPH and you only have about 100 yards to do it in a tin can of a car. Of course remembering to check fake intersections the whole way.

All of the turns and lane changes were on me before I knew it, and when I finally got to a straight section, I forgot where to go next and just went through the intersection with the stoplight. The proctor told me to stop the car and, in an annoyed and condescending voice, told me the proper route.

I continued and handled the S-curve and the crank (a tiny backroad in the shape of a digital five) just fine. I was doing hand-over-hand and was never out of control of the car or the situation.

I took my advice and put a remorseful look on my face, hoping that that might work. It didn’t. I failed for not being close enough to the center line when making right turns, and for forgetting to wait three seconds AFTER signalling to check for a safe lane change. That was the first I had heard of the three-second rule.

The crabs looked happy to welcome me to their bucket. One fellow said, “I know this isn’t a driving test. This is a culture test for me.” But he pressed on complaining about the differences between the Japanese test and the test he took in high school and doomed himself to continue making the same mistakes.

I listened to that on the train the whole way home and encouraged him to be more positive about it, but he wasn’t having it.

I wouldn’t be able to return to the license center for another week due to a scouting trip to Tokyo, but I did my best to use my time there to commit the “great advice” to memory.

Any time I wanted to go to the right, I got my body close to the blind lines on the sidewalk. Every time I wanted to move to the right, I pretended to signal and then WAIT three seconds before checking over my right shoulder. That move was totally against my intuition, because when I drive I throw down the signal and check right away.

It probably looked dumb, but the test is dumb and that’s what I had to do to pass the test. I thought positively about it and dreamed about nailing every turn and checking every intersection.

Finally, Day 2 arrived. Many of the same crabs were there, having failed twice more each in the time I was away. The noon siren wailed, and we were out walking the course. I realized that I could not be with them for an hour the way I had been last time; I had to remain positive.

When we hit the 25 MPH zone, I began running. Running to get out of the bucket, but also to speed things up and properly choreograph the checks I would have to do on that section. It worked. I got around the course three times, planned all checks, signals, and lane changes, and felt prepared for the test.

Once I went to signal and turned on the windshield wipers (the rod is on the opposite side of the steering column here), but it went perfectly otherwise. I didn’t hear the proctor write anything down, and when I went to get my precious advice, it sounded more like a send-off into the world of driving in Japan than tips on how to get a better time on Mario Kart.

Poor Mr. Culture Test failed again, but a couple others passed along with me. We sat through a short lecture, got pictures taken, and escaped with shiny new driver’s licenses. I felt sixteen again and remarked that I didn’t think I would get this day twice.

I strongly believe that mental preparation in Tokyo and maintaining positivity by avoiding the crabs are the reasons I passed the second time. I also strongly believe that I would have been Mr. Culture Test if I had tried to take this test in Fukushima in 2005.

I empathized with him, but I could not make him hear the message. He may still be taking the test.

The bikers had a mini-intervention with me recently about getting a new bike. Pretty Guy asked when it was happening, and I gave my usual answer: “When I win the lottery.”

Then Larry stepped in. Larry is about fifty years old with a square, tanned face and salt-and-pepper hair. He rides 150 to 200 miles a week and wins races in and out of his age bracket. He looks exactly like a Japanese version of an American biker and family friend named Larry, hence the nickname.

Larry is so much faster than everyone else that I only see him when he is climbing a slope for the second time in order to keep moving on our Sunday rides. I usually say “good morning” to him and he’s out of earshot before I can say “wait for me!”

So I was surprised that he even knew my name, let alone my situation with The Club of bikes. He said that a new bike for me would be an invitation to the front of the pack. Then the others chimed in:

“It’ll change your life!”

“It’ll change your body!”

“YOU will have to pull US up the hills, Mac!”

Before I knew it they were around me in a semi-circle and I blushed at the attention. My man-crush on Larry increased when he picked up a strawberry I had dropped on the ground during the intervention and ate it, stem and all. What a man’s man.

A new road bike is not in the budget as far as I can see, and I’ve learned to use the tools that I have to keep it fun on Sundays. I accept that I have to try harder and work slower than everyone else and make adjustments to narrow the gap and really be part of the club.

I wonder why I’m OK with that while I’m intolerant of anything of the sort in all other areas of life. My computer is slowing down and twice a day I’m ready to chuck it into the canal. Lesson planning at work is still incredibly inefficient and it takes everything I have not to get upset at the silly system.

Could it be that I’m actually HAVING FUN with something? Trying hard and sweating at something without going completely AGGRO about the tiniest setback? Realizing that something isn’t a competition and detaching myself from the results?

I’m saving up for a road bike, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull the trigger when the time comes. The situation is too good now and I fear that a faster, better bike may introduce some of the enjoyable, fun-for-everyone elements listed above.

Or perhaps I can grow up and leave those in my dust as I pull the rest of KCTC up and down the mountain roads of Kochi.