Welcome to Happy Hands City!

Hello, everyone.

To all of you out there in the United States, welcome to Happy Hands City! Some of you might be wondering about the strange title of this blog, and I'll get to that eventually. First, allow me to set the stage a little bit and tell you about how I ended up here in lovely Satte City, Saitama, Japan.

Right now, I'm working as an assistant language teacher (ALT), teaching English in the land of sakura. I got this job through a little thing called the "JET Program(me)" that some of you out there may have heard of. At any rate, I left on the 1st of August for Japan. The flight was appropriately long (about 2 hours to NY followed by 14 hours to Tokyo) and I arrived jet-lagged and downright delirious. On the bright side, I finally got to see Star Trek XI, and the part where someone's decapitated head destroys a nuclear cooling tower at the end of X-Men Origins!

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Luckily for crazy-out-of-my-mind me, the Tokyo orientation assistants ushered me and my fellow JETs along from place to place, acting as human signposts essentially. Thus, we made it to the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku with no problems except for (and I speak for myself) empty stomachs.

The next two days were a blur of workshops, speeches and seminars. They shoved so much information down my throat I could barely bend my neck to nod in agreement. I met other ALTs going to my prefecture, had a lot of laughs and made a lot of friends. We did some purikura pictures together (for the uninitiated, purikura is essentially a photobooth with clip art) that turned out fantastic. I'll try to get them posted on the internet someday. Oh, and as a side note: for those who watched the informational DVD with me, I got to meet a lot of the people featured on it. That tool from the opening?--actually a really cool, hilarious guy as it turns out.

After that, it was off to meet the people who hired me. At the welcome meet in Saitama City, the prefectural capital, I finally met three of the Satte City Board of Education employees who I'll be working with over the next year. I also met Joe, fellow Satte City ALT and next door neighbor. Then, whoosh! Into the car and once again whisked away. After a brief eel lunch, we were off to the quiet burg of Satte.

The kanji for Satte (幸手） literally means "Happy Hands" and the city has spared no expense in taking this to heart. Every year the citizens vote on "the happiest person in Japan" and have the winner come to Satte to put their hand print on a monument just outside of the city office I work in. Is this weird? A little. What really makes it weird is that this literal translation is found on all sorts of city publications. The town map says "Happy Hands City", and who are we to argue with that?

Satte is a mid-sized, quiet city in the northeast of Saitama prefecture. It's probably most famous for gongendogawa (権現堂川）, a river with a 1km long track of cherry trees along its bank. It's a hot spot for cherry blossom viewing in the spring, and I hear it can get pretty crowded.

I arrived and met the rest of my co-workers. I won't go into detail, because no one likes being blogged about, but suffice it to say, they're very nice and helpful. Almost no one speaks any English though, which means I'll have plenty of opportunities for speaking Japanese. As for the other two ALTs, Marisa and Lina, we all get along well. They're good people.

After filling out forms for my alien registration card and getting my cellphone (actually not that cool for a Japanese cellphone), I finally got to see my new apartment. In short, I love it. It's so much bigger than I expected. Pictures below:

On the second day, the new arrivals (Joe, Marisa, and I) were taken along with a bunch of other teachers on a shinai meguri (市内巡り） a sort of tour of Satte's cultural blessings. Among the sights: a pile of rocks used to mark a point from when Taira no Masakado's head was moved from Kyoto to Ibaraki, a statue detailing a Buddhist depiction of the virgin mary created by secret Christians during the early Edo period, and a famous Go player's grave.

Since then, I've been "working" (and I use that term loosely) at the Board of Education. What this really amounts to is that I sit in a room and do self-study. All of the teachers are on summer break, so there's not really anything for me to do. I actually look forward to the calisthenics in the morning, not only because the town song is so damn catchy, but because it means that I get to move and do something in the office.

Once the weekend rolled around, I took a trip up to Ueno with Marisa, Lina, and Marisa's friend Stephanie from a few towns over. We had a great time checking out the science museum and shopping around. On Sunday evening, we were hit by an earthquake. Not like the wimpy one that I felt from the Gulf of Mexico last year. This was a real earthquake. Powerful enough to knock out my cable at least. Certainly an experience.

And now the week begins anew. Here's a few random things that I didn't really fit into the chronology, but somehow happened:
-I bought a trash can that says "Feed me, please" on the side
-I watched Jerry Maguire on VHS
-I accidentally left a window open during a storm, and my tatami got wet. This caused me to panic. I called up one of my co-workers, and she lent me some towels and said that everything was probably going to be fine.
-When the cable came back, Alf was on.
-Lina tried to teach us some Russian
-I cooked some weird eggplant... thing
-I listened to Bombadil roughly 5,000 times. Their new album is so good.
-Marisa inherited a goldfish from her predecessor. It's now named Takkun.
-Joe taught me to play Shogi. It's way different from Chess.
-I learned that chap stick in Japan is called "lip cream".

It's an impossible task to sum up everything that's happened this past week, but this at least gives you an idea. From now on, I'll hopefully update more regularly. I'll be able to share my experiences with all of you out there, and you'll come to know this "Happy Hands City" as I do.