A chapter that pits teacher against teacher in a thrilling and bloody fight for job security.
I have recently come into possession of a videotape with very dark powers. This video could wreak unspeakable havoc if it fell into the wrong hands, which it did when I got it from Rachel the other night. We were sitting around on the floor of her small flat in Ogikubo desperately trying to get stoned off some really, really weak weed and talking about things we missed about our homeland.
“Pop-Tarts,” I sigh.
“Antiperspirant,” she coos.
“Squeeze cheese.”
“Jon Stewart.”
We look at each other wistfully and say, in unison, “Mexicans!”
“You know what?” Rachel starts, sheepishly. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I really miss Survivor.”
“Oh, Rachel,” I respond, shaking my head with profound disappointment.
I’ve always considered myself free of certain curious traits shared by a good number of my fellow Americans: a high tolerance threshold for precocious children in television commercials, sitcoms, and movies; the biological need to wear baseball hats; the tendency to order sandwiches bigger than one’s head-these kinds of things. And I know for a fact that the same would be true of the need to see people fighting tooth and nail, embarrassing themselves, putting their lives in danger, and offing each other one by one on prime time.
It’s not that the idea of people flung together on television to make each other’s lives miserable doesn’t appeal to me. Of course it does. I am human, after all. Humiliation television is a staple of Japanese TV, and I’ve enjoyed watching some of the late-night shows that deal with this very issue. I can’t really understand what’s going on, but I’m able to catch on with the help of Akiko, my roommate and interpreter. One of the best I’ve seen gathers together a different group of four or five up-and-coming female teen “idols” every week-always cute models or pop stars-and makes them choose who among them is a) the bitchiest, b) the least talented, c) the ugliest, and d) the stupidest. The announcer reads the results of each vote, people cheer, and the camera zooms in on the unfortunate winner, who does her best to save face and laugh it off, bowing her head repeatedly.
“She just voted ugliest girl,” Akiko would explain, completely straight-faced.
One time there was one girl who won all four. All four. Yet when the camera zoomed in on her face, she may as well have just been told she would have to wait thirty minutes for a table by the window. She nodded, looked a little disappointed, and quietly waited for the camera to leave her the fuck alone. Then she probably went home and threw herself belly-first onto her pink sword with the satin trimming on the sheath.
I guess the reason I enjoy watching the Japanese get up to all this foolishness is because they’re generally so pathologically shy, their reactions to such awful circumstances as being hung upside down by their toenails and whipped with udon noodles or forced to mud-wrestle a businessman who happens to be wearing only Speedos and a wristwatch make for compelling viewing. The contestants, who often appear to have found themselves on television by accident, nod answers to questions and explain slowly and thoughtfully their feelings about what has happened to them as the sadistic laughter of the audience and panel of hosts roll in. Americans, on the other hand, believe in the manifest destiny of stardom. We’ll do shocking things to get noticed, we relish the spotlight we’re given, and we don’t really know when to shut up once we have it. We love to talk about absolutely nothing important and to cry while doing so. We enjoy the attention way too much. The Japanese just seem to endure it.
“Oh, please, don’t be such a snob,” Rachel chides. “It’s really cool and totally addictive. It’s like a drug, I swear, especially when you have a tape and you can watch them all back-to-back.”
The two magic words: addictive, drug.
“Oh my God, you have a tape?!” I shout, tapping my arm, looking for a vein.
She reaches into the cupboard under her television and pulls out an old-school videocassette labeled on the side, “Survivor Season 1: Chronic.” She hands it to me, and I can feel myself already surrendering to its sweet, sweet oblivion.
You see, I know my tendency to get sucked in by appalling television shows. I get my emotions tangled in their ridiculously threaded and highly unlikely plotlines and find it impossible to tear myself away. I watched one Friday episode of General Hospital when I was thirteen and ended up addicted for three years. I take the videotape home to Koenji and slide it into the VCR.
Though I try to keep an emotional distance from the proceedings, it’s not easy, what with my attachments and aversions to certain people quickly forming and the hand-wringing uncertainty of the outcome. It’s frightening, but I quickly find myself seduced by the show. All my previous dismissals of it fade more and more with each new immunity challenge. I am an expatriate obsessed. And I am able to indulge my obsession uninterrupted, for I have the entire series on video, from start to finish. No commercial breaks, no waiting long weeks to find out who will be the next to be crushed under the weight of all the backstabbing, allegiance switching, and general inhumanity. It all happens in an action-packed, two-day holiday from work. By the end of the videotape, my eyes are swollen and blood-red, my mouth is covered with potato chip crumbs, I’m inadvertently blowing drool bubbles when I exhale, and I’ve lost the ability to move my toes. I stumble bleary-eyed out into the kitchen and out the front door. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. I catch a reflection of myself in the neighbor’s kitchen window. Wow, I look horrible. Like a ninety-year-old woman. Then I realize it is a ninety-year-old woman I’m staring at. Grumpy old Miss Ueno, doing dishes, gazing out the window, and giving me her obligatory daily look of suspicion and disapproval. I wave to her and quietly vote her off the island.
“I need the next tape!” I say to Rachel calmly. “Give it to me! Where is it?!”
“I knew you’d love it,” Rachel sings.
“I don’t just love it. I need it. Please tell me you have another season on video.”
She doesn’t. I gasp.
“You know what, though?” she offers. “Just watch the same season again. It’s really fun because you know when everyone’s going to be kicked off and you can look forward to it.”
So, like any junkie, I go back for sloppy seconds.
I again watch the episodes straight through in a marathon effort that tests nothing more than my ability to sit down for long stretches of time. But it is only in the following weeks that I realize the huge impact that Survivor has made on my life.
The world around me has become my own personal tribal council. I am now fixated on the idea of voting people who are in some way undesirable out of my life. On the train late on a Saturday night, sitting next to a drunken salaryman keeling over into the about-to-throw-up position, I find myself looking around to see who might be encouraged to join in an alliance with me to get him voted off the train.
Or standing in line at the invariably long lunch-hour ATM line at the bank, the machines already occupied by customers engaged in every form of banking transaction possible by machine in Japan-withdrawals, bankbook updates, transfers, deposits, movie tickets, laundry, pap smears, and so forth-all taking up precious time. “The tribe has spoken,” I grumble to myself, gazing at the tiny lady who shows no signs of giving up her position at the machine.
And of course in class, on those days when a student-for example a young female university student named Noriko, eyelashes curled, lip gloss immaculately applied, mobile phone ringing repeatedly-is too scared to speak to me, too embarrassed to speak to her partner, yet too dedicated to say “screw English” and walk out, I relish the idea of being able to just close my eyes, cast a vote in my head, and exterminate the weakest link from the room.
Soon I start to think about the English teachers here at Lane and how the Survivor rules could be applied to us. If for some reason we were forced to vote other teachers out of the school, who would be the ultimate survivor?
“It would totally be me,” my roommate Eric says without a moment’s hesitation. I admire his self-assurance, but I smile at the thought of voting him off at the tribal council just to thwart his plan and take him down a few pegs. To the camera, I’d say, “Eric, you’re a good guy and a great roommate, and I love listening to you and your boyfriend have sex upstairs, but your overconfidence is a real drag.” This all given I haven’t been voted off yet.
“’Twouldn’t be me,” Will from South Africa imagines aloud. “Jdddiengkcmd wowiuet cuirtios oourdke todlsh mwlekeri, and dkeiwpo wojdap wieorot woeikd ih sowheiwo rowierhs.” I’m not sure what reason he’s giving, but I tend to think it has something to do with the fact that no one can ever understand a goddamn word he is saying. Ever. No, it ’twouldn’t.
So who would it be? Definitely not Brodie and his mullet. No reasonable teacher would allow that hairstyle to survive and prosper at this school. And what about everyone’s favorite ex-military man McD? He has the deltoids and abs to survive in the real Survivor, certainly. But that will get you nowhere here. Recently he put a sign on his shelf reading, “THE STUFF ON THIS SHELF IS NOT PUBLIC PROPERTY. HANDS OFF,” which I think somehow alienated the majority of the other teachers. It was completely unnecessary, since none of us want his Listerine, razors, cologne, or collection of muscle tees, and we definitely aren’t interested in pilfering his lesson plans, which we imagine contain multiple-choice exercises like:
Please write the correct choice on the line. If you circle the answer and don’t write it on the line, the answer is wrong. Sorry. I can’t help you if you don’t follow directions. Pay attention next time.
1) McD gave his girl a dozen roses and took her out to Applebee’s ____________________(to celebrate/for celebrating) their one-week anniversary.
2) McD beat up the guys trying to scam on his girl ____________________ (with/by) his bare hands.
I’ll hazard a guess that he and his shelf would be two of the first to go, though the shelf might last longer depending on how badly we needed to shave.
And how about yours truly? How long would I last in this game?
“We’d get voted off at the same time,” Rachel says with absolute certainty. “Everyone would write both our names on that little paper with exclamation marks after them once they got sick of hearing us talk about stupid shit. We don’t have any other role here. We have nothing else to contribute.”
I think back to the last few no-doubt very loud conversations Rachel and I had in the teachers’ room. Let’s see, we covered 1) the screw-ability of Japanese heartthrob Masaya Kato (extreme), 2) the lameness of the sandwich choices at the Daily Yamazaki convenience store (potatoes on white bread is not nearly as good as it sounds), and 3) how Madonna rates as a lyricist (verdict: not great but better than Björk). Yeah, I’d vote us off, too.
My Survivor obsession begins to subside a bit, and I try and return to some semblance of a normal life-the carefree life I had before that odious videotape-until I’m shaken back into survival mode after a curious twist of fate at our busy conversation school.
PLI and Wyndam, the two companies that until recently co-owned Lane Language School, are constantly at odds with each other, the former being PR-based and the latter concentrated on curriculum development. It is a marriage made in hell. As teachers, we are actually contracted to and paid by Wyndam, but this is all about to change. The two companies are dissolving their partnership, and PLI will take over the entire school. For most of us teachers, this is not good news. Why? The PR people.
The job of the PR people is to bring prospective students into the school, show (sometimes drag) them around, and convince them that really expensive English lessons are just what they need. During their tour of the school, the PR person will joyfully tell them as many lies about the greatness of the school as they can fit into thirty minutes. To a young, homely male college student-“Most guys your age usually find girlfriends here.” To an elderly, blue-haired obaasan-“Do you like my Japanese? I learned it using this school’s method.” (Our school doesn’t teach Japanese.) Lies, lies, lies. And then they come to us and ask us to do a “level check” on the student, hoping we don’t manage to ruin the momentum they’ve got going and scare him or her away with our loud Western speech and pronounced gestures.
The PR people are an enigma, and they wear very strong cologne. They’re kind of like “the TV people” that Carol Ann is so spooked by in Poltergeist: disruptive, creepy to be around (as salespeople usually are), and possessed of evil clown faces. They also never take on the same form twice, and the smile you saw yesterday may turn into something much scarier if you don’t watch yourself. So we’re less than thrilled that they will now be overseeing every aspect of the school, lording it over us with what we can only assume will be a firm hand, a steady grip, and, perhaps, a swimming pool full of dead bodies.
But the real poignant moment comes when we’re told via office memo that as a result of the switchover in ownership, the Ginza school will close and the entire Lane School will become concentrated on the two floors we now occupy in Shinjuku. Which means that some of Lane’s one hundred teachers will be let go.
Upon hearing the news, each of us feels a surge of vulnerability course through our bodies.
“Oh shit, if I lose a job as a freaking English teacher in Japan, I’m going to gouge my eyes out,” Rachel said. And I must say I am right there with her. It’s about as hard to get fired from a teaching job in Japan as it is to be mistaken for a native Japanese. As my former employer so clearly demonstrated, some schools seem to import village idiots from across the English-speaking world to come and try their luck teaching in this fair country. As a result, some poor Japanese folks are probably walking around saying things like “Jerry, he a lazy, good-for-nothing mama’s boy and he deserve what he get. I’m glad I fucked his cousin!” So what does it say about one if one is actually sacked from the easiest job to get in the country?
I shift immediately back into Survivor mode, making a mental list of all of those who are more likely to get the sack than I am. The word on the street is that there are certain teachers who have numerous complaints in their file already: Fran, who is always putting his name and phone number on the board at the beginning of every class and has been heard encouraging a few unimpressionable young girls to use it; Brad, who has offended a few with his chronic sweating problem; and of course Will, whose file allegedly overflows with accounts of students unable to follow anything he said in any of his classes, ever, in his history as an instructor. And this is only what Tami knows. Rachel is bound to know more.
“So Rachel, what’s the story? Who’s gonna get the axe? Give me the lowdown, the 411, the in-fo-ma-shun.”
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve heard a few rumors about Fran, Brad, and Will, but not much else.”
Drat. The one person I thought I could count on to have her finger on the pulse is no more clued-in than I.
Work becomes a little unsteady. It’s kind of a dramatic time, each of us teaching our classes as if in a matter of weeks we will be peddling English lessons door to door. All of a sudden, our lives have turned into Survivor: Tokyo Smackdown. Will we start engaging in sabotage against each other, planting incriminating evidence in each other’s classrooms? Will I walk into a class one day soon and find that my students have already been given a handout with a paragraph at the top detailing the order in which I’d like to see them naked and the reasons why followed by a fill-in-the-blank exercise at the bottom? Will I retaliate against this unknown trickster by replacing all of his or her worksheets for students with a positive chlamydia test result made using the Roppongi Hills Clinic letterhead? Will embarrassing dirty laundry start being aired, like what so-and-so did with a student in the restroom of the club the other night that’s not really true but would really make tongues wag if announced in the lobby where everyone can hear it? Will friend turn against friend and colleague against colleague in a ruthless race to see who will be the ultimate sensei? Sounds fun.
Unfortunately, some folks have already decided they’re not up for this kind of cutthroat competition. They are happy to pack it in, to give up like a bunch of gutless Democrats. Pam takes this company upheaval as a sign that she should move herself, her Japanese husband, and her little girl back to mighty Canada.
“We went home last summer and visited my sister, her husband, and their two children. Their combined income is just a little more than ours and they have a house in Vancouver that’s so big they have rooms that don’t get used for weeks.”
“But Pam,” I say, “don’t you want to see who gets taken down in all this? Aren’t you the least bit curious to see how popular a teacher you really a-”
“They also have a sailboat and a little getaway cabin on the Puget Sound!”
“Wow, that’s pretty cool, Pa-”
“And they have a nanny helping her with the kids. A nanny, for God’s sake!”
“But, Pam, your students need you!”
“Oh, fuck the students! All we have to show for our income here is a two-bedroom place two hours outside of Tokyo and my daughter’s print club collection! It’s time to move!”
A few other craven souls have the same idea. At least three other teachers are packing up their Japanese spouses and getting the hell out of Dodge. Greg is going back to Detroit, Lyle is moving to LA, and Rich is returning to Australia to buy a house and settle down and marry his girlfriend. It is a time of soul-searching and uncovering what one really wants out of life. Pfft. Obviously some people would rather leave and do something substantial and rewarding with their lives than stay and play Tokyo Smackdown for a prize they’re not sure they even want anymore. Pussies.
The number of teachers is already dwindling, and nobody has even gotten fired yet. Thankfully, there’s a good number of us who have decided to stay and fight. Or at least stay and keep teaching until we get the axe, at which point we will beg on our knees for our jobs back. None of us is foolish enough to think that we’re in the clear. After all, we really have no idea what the students say about us. I assume I’m a well-liked teacher, but who’s to say I don’t have a long list of complaints from students offended by my statuesque frame, undeniable and distracting sex appeal, intimidating intellect, impeccable taste in music and hair products, and enviable sock collection? The drama of knowing that not one of us is safe is absolutely delicious.
Of course, the big talk around the shop is about the prize that will be bestowed upon the chosen ones, namely, what kind of compensation we’ll get from Wyndam for breaking contract with us, because essentially they’re firing us and another company is hiring us. There have been whispers about three months’ salary, the prospect of which makes me weak in the knees. That sweet cash could completely clear me of all my debt and also pay for something new and completely unnecessary, like that giant, gold-flecked piggy bank I’ve had my eye on at that shop on Omotesando Dori in Harajuku.
“Oooh! I could also get that five-foot statue of that drag-queen Buddha for my room!” I think as I Photoshop a picture of McD from the Christmas party to make it look like he’s lifting the skirt of one of our elderly students, a picture I plan to leave on the floor of the lobby.
The whole takeover thing takes on a new light. For those who survive the downsizing, it’s beginning to look like getting fired will be the best thing that’s happened to us since all that high school graduation money. We’ll be paid for doing absolutely nothing, an idea that has always appealed to me but never seemed all that realistic.
School spirit lifts. We begin teaching our classes with enthusiasm and verve once again, knowing that in a few short weeks we could be going shopping.
Finally, after weeks and weeks of hand-wringing, the decision is handed down. The tribe has spoken, and sure enough, Fran, Brad, and Will have been unanimously voted off by the new management. And there’s one surprise. Keith Brady-cute, sweet, cuddly little Keith; gentle, soft-spoken, sensitive little Keith, and, at five feet two inches and 130 pounds, just plain little Keith-has also gotten the can. Apparently little Keith had a little problem with sleeping with almost every little student under the age of eighteen (the age of consent in Japan is sixteen) and then never speaking to them again, even in class. Little Keith was a little pig.
The remaining teachers will be paid in full next month, and there will be much celebration all over the greater Tokyo area. We have indeed been the ultimate survivors, and we haven’t had to eat cow brain, sleep in the rain, or wipe our asses with leaves. And though I would have preferred to watch my colleagues engage in a little more backstabbing and shit throwing, you can’t have everything in this world.
I may not be the ultimate survivor, but I did survive, even if ultimately I’m not sure how badly I really wanted to. But the bottom line is this: I survived, and I have a giant tranny Buddha with a gold-flecked piggy on a leash standing in the corner of my bedroom to show for it.
But will I survive the PR people?
# of “X-large” T-shirts bought that cut off blood circulation to wrists and hands: 4
# of kanji characters studied: 120
# of kanji characters forgotten: 104