Interests:Guitar, Gundam Plastic Models and other big robots, good video games, well-told stories. Expertise:Karaoke, Heavy Metal, Writing Fiction, Cold War History, Speech Writing, Embarassing myself, Being sedentary. Occupation:Education/training
My voice echoes in my apartment. With all the furniture and sliding doors removed, there is nothing to absorb the sound. It's a familiar feeling, hearing my own voice echo here, like the time I moved in here three years ago. Now all that remains left here are the bags I've packed and the dust balls here and there, tell-tale indicators of my reluctance to maintain a steady cleaning ritual of any kind.
I am 4 days away from leaving Japan. I will leave on the 14th of April, just three days after this Newsletter will celebrate its 5th anniversary. About five and a half years since I first came to Japan. When I came to Japan, I was 23 years old. Now, I'm 29. Despite only having spent only about one sixth of my entire life here, I can sincerely admit that much of who I am now is a reflection of these past five and a half years spent living in Japan.
There's a lot that I'm trying to ignore right now. That icky feeling that sets in around dusk, the one that reminds me of break ups and failed puttings-off of days past. The one that reminds me of the impending change. I've written about all of this before, about 3 years ago, when I finished my time on JET. This time, there is a more justified finality to it all, as for the first time in my life the future beyond Japan seems more tangible than it has ever seemed before.
Now, more than ever, I know the reason why I am leaving Japan. Despite having thoroughly enjoyed my experience here, despite having done a considerable job acclimating to this country and its people, and despite the fact that up until last month, my job was basically to play and have fun with children, despite all these things, I know for the first time in my life, more than ever, why I am leaving.
Having spent these past five years in the company of some of the greatest teachers I have ever known has had a certain discernible effect on me. I did more than most to try and push the limits of what an ALT can do in Japan. Someday I will write it all down (and in so writing that sentence, I am being held to that promise by all those who read it), but for the most part, despite my title of Assistant Language Teacher, I had become in the last two years, a kind of homeroom teacher in Japan. Not formally of course, but for all that I had been doing and had learned how to do, I had come that much closer to being a real teacher.
And while nothing would make me happier than to become an actual homeroom teacher here in Japan, the reality is that I will never be able to do such a thing. At least not as I am now. I want to become a good teacher, like the ones I've worked with for the last 5 years. People I am truly proud to call my teammates and friends. I've never known such pride. I count myself inordinately lucky to have known and worked with such good people, for as long and as often as I have. It truly has been a wondrous experience.
I will be returning to Hawaii on April 14th to take a small break before beginning some honest efforts to choose a good graduate school. I will be working hard to obtain scholarships and fellowships to fund my way. In the past, these were things that I honestly felt were out of my reach, but recently I've realized that it was probably one of the stupidest things I have ever done, to believe that I was not good enough to get ANY kind of scholarship. I know what I'm capable of, I know what I deserve, I've spent too much time just dismissing that for no reason. It's time to claim something good for myself. Graduate school will help me to realize my potential--the same potential that others around me see, that for whatever reason I've just been ignoring all these years.
And so, it's time for me to move on.
But, as with all things in life, with the pursuit of something better for oneself, and with the start of a new journey, there are friends and loved ones that will be left behind. I know why I have to leave Japan. It's just the going, the departing, the leaving-part of it that is hurting most right now. I've known such wonderful people, such inspiring students. People I have learned so much from, just from being their friend. People who have been gracious enough to take a chance and get to know me despite how scary that must have been for them to try and befriend a foreigner. People I've shared smiles, laughter, and tears with. The people I've grown to know and love.
It's in these partings that we know just how much these people mean to us. And for all my efforts to try not to cry at my farewell speeches or various goodbye venues, I know in my heart that there is nothing more human than to feel the way I do now. So happy to have met them, so sad to be leaving, and all the while feeling that warmth of support that they are offering me. I can't let myself or anyone down in what lies ahead. There is too much good here, in this moment of my life for me to fail.
I wrote in my JET application essay that coming to Japan would be like meeting an old friend for the very first time. In hindsight, I was lucky and that proved to be mostly true. Now I feel torn between two homes--the place where I am from, and the place where I became a teacher. I am from two clans now--my real family and the family I found in Japan. And although, for the time being, this is goodbye, I feel so very grateful that the people I can call "my family" has grown.
This is the first time I can demonstrate with any clarity just how three-dimensional these items really are. Much more illustrative than the stock 2D flatpic I'm quite fond of posting.
In any event, this is a commercial I crafted for my company's upcoming weapons, the twin gunblades MASAMUNE and MURAMASA.
Per the screencap/photoshopped ads, the tentative release date for these new gunblades is sometime in, hopefully early, October. Reason being that my newly hired scripter (a French person who is an actual programmer in real life) is currently working on the script and the current gunblade animations that I have for my other gunblades won't work on these, as the handles are set at 50 degrees from the alignment of the blade itself. So I have to give myself time to hire a custom animator.
Development
For some months now, I've been in a state of creative gestation, or a funk. My company seems to be doing fairly well in Second Life, enough to start cushioning real life to some degree, and I knew that the lull in sales basically meant it was time to go back into the workshop and start hammering out a new weapon.
I went through several experimental designs. As I deal primarily in hybrid weapons/gunblades these days, I toyed around with a variety of different combinations, all to no avail. Of those that started on the anvil and ended up in the trash were a Barrett .50 Sniper Rifle gunblade, a .50 AE Desert Eagle gunblade, and an M203 grenade launcher gunblade. Obviously, these designs may end up in a future project, but this summer when I tried them out they looked pretty dumb.
I played around with the idea of making a chainsword, akin to the ones they have in the Warhammer 40K universe. That also, went fairly uninspired, though.
In the end, I started having the most creative success with a symmetrical gunblade design based on a particle beam sandwiched between two isosceles blades with a future-weapon feel. In the end, though, this also proved to be something pretty that I just didn't feel satisfied with.
Around the beginning of August, I was wiki-ing around, reading up on Robocop for some reason (who knows why, and consequently, who can trace these walkabouts of thought anyhow?) and I saw a photo of him sporting is iconic "Auto-9" (a highly modded version of a Beretta M-93R). Suddenly something clicked, I even recall exclaiming something aloud in my apartment.
I went to work immediately, harvesting any large photo of Auto-9 that I could find. After I had a sufficient sample, I started to craft a 3D model. For some reason, whenever I start building a gun, I always start from the barrel. Fairly peculiar, I think, mainly because from a practical standpoint, starting from the aperture of the barrel would make scaling the object as a whole more difficult, but it is just one of those things I suppose.
About two thirds of the way finished, I had another flash of insight. This new project required a blade, but what blade or short sword would match Auto-9? I put the question in the back of my mind as I labored through crafting the handle and magazine, then I realized that the particle beam gunblade that I had trashed had the missing piece of the puzzle.
Originally constructed as a pair of isosceles "kite wings," the particle beam blade had a pronged look to it, and it sort of resembled the Vic Viper from the game Gradius. I took one of the kite wings off, and affixed it to the underside of the barrel of the Auto-9, and after taking a step back and looking at the whole thing, I realized I had basically finalized the iconic look of this gunblade.
Naturally, comparisons for the Masamune as a whole can be drawn between it and Seifer Almasy's Hyperion gunblade from FFVIII, mainly as the gun unit in the Hyperion was modeled after a standard Beretta M92. The larger blade with its blunted end, however, looks more like Yazoo's gunblade from FFVII Advent Children. In the end, I was more than satisfied with the result. I knew it was a keeper when I basically kept inspecting it from every angle, not to fine tune anything in particular, but because this weapon was wicked to look at. It was the same way I felt upon finalizing the Vendetta gunblades.
The Muramasa, the twin counterpart gunblade, came out as a way of acquiescing my urge to mold weapons around a story or legend. The legend of the rivalry between the famous Japanese swordsmiths Masamune and Muramasa is hinted at in several anime and video game titles, but few are really aware of how the stories actually go. Factually, this rivalry could not have existed in the first place, as both of these smithing geniuses lived a hundred years apart, but it is not beyond speculation to say that Muramasa was at least aware of Masamune's work.
Masamune's blades are of a legendary status in Japan, and are said to be the finest forged blades in history. There are a few Masamune blades left in the possession of the Japanese Royal family. The others have been lost, one in particular, the Honjo Masamune which was given to a United States Cavalry officer for safekeeping during WWII (I dunno why) and has since gone missing.
Muramasa's forged works are legendary as well, but in a much more infamous way. Muramasa swords are said to be cursed or bloodthirsty. It is said that, if drawn, a Muramasa blade must taste blood again before it can be returned to its sheath. Tokugawa Ieyasu outlawed the use and ownership of Muramasa blades because he had allegedly lost several friends and family members to these swords and had cut himself very badly upon the one that he personally owned.
Both of these master's swords have made various cameo appearances in a number of fictional works, but that's another entry altogether.
In any event, having been enthralled by the legends of both of these swordsmiths, I couldn't go ahead with releasing a gunblade named "Masamune" without also releasing a counterpart gunblade called "Masamune." Even if I did, I would feel something wasn't quite right, but that's just me.
Keeping with the idea that a Muramasa blade is cursed with a supernatural bloodthirst, I set about the task of designing a gunblade that could be the evil twin brother of Masamune. For the gun, I selected a SVI Infinity .45, which is a target competition, fully-customized variant of the trusty Colt 1911 .45. SVI Infinities were ridiculously popular with the airsoft community I was a part of in Hawaii, and the boxy, no-nonsense look of the gun, along with its myriad custom add-ons made this gun the total weapon of choice. Combine that with the fact that the .45 as a caliber has the definitional reputation as a man-stopping round, and you got the perfect bloodthirsty weapon.
The original Muramasa had a gun-metal black slide with glowing red inlays, but I had to alter the design due to scripting peculiarities that I won't get into here (this darker, red-inlay version appears in the video briefly at 0:42). I changed the slide to the silver sheen that was featured in the video above, and kept the frame of the gun gun-metal black. In the end, I may issue both versions of the gunblade in a fat pack. A friend even suggested doing a Hello Kitty-themed version of the Muramasa, complete with a pink slide. I think I will go through with it as a joke, but the punchline comes when someone pays for it.
My friend Lord Bastich Herr Geist had once remarked that "you always know what you're getting when you buy a 311 album, but that consitency never dulls the result."
I have no choice but to agree, and no inclination to argue otherwise.
311--we all know who they are, and what they do, and like a fine wine their flavor seems to only get better with age. And this is the apparent flavor of the season, as I have yet to tire of this song even after so many hundreds of listens in a fraction of as many months.
When I was 11, my family moved from Hawaii Kai to Kapolei, and I changed schools from Star of the Sea Elementary to St. Joseph in Waipahu. I won't get into the social dichotomy of it all, but suffice it to say that the former was much more upper-class than the latter.
I was singled out pretty fast. "Eh! Das dat kid dat say 'please' and 'tank you' lidat!" and it all came to a head in my first month there when a guy who seemed to help me get acquainted with everything at first, suddenly turned on me and started to harass and beat me up. I was literally afraid for my life, and I did what any private school kid would do--I went and told my teacher, Sister Margie. She told me she would talk to that kid. Nothing came of that consultation, and I genuinely began to fear going to St. Joseph's in Waipahu.
One day he pushed me into a corner and spat on me, laughed and walked away. That was the day I finally told my Dad about what had happened.
He asked me if I had spoken with St. Margie about it, I had said that I did, and that a week had passed and nothing. That morning he parked the car and came with me all the way to the classroom.
Dad walked up to Sister Margie and demanded to speak with the guy who was bullying me. I was embarassed, mainly because everyone was staring at me and my Dad.
Sister Margie seemed almost as though she had suddenly remembered that she was supposed to do something about the situation, like be a teacher.
She told my father that she would handle the situation. I remember that my Dad reassured me that she would, and he promptly left for work. Looking back on it now, it does seem rather abrupt, but in all probabilities, my father probably gave Sister Margie a sufficiently stern look before feeling that it was alright for him to leave. I'm fairly unable to confirm, as I was staring mostly at the ground through most of what had just happened.
Sister Margie called us over to her desk, asked a few questions to confirm what he had been doing to me throughout the past month, gave him detention, then proceeded to lecture me. She told me that I shouldn't have brought my father into this.
I remember knowing the injustice of what she had said at that very moment. But I didn't say anything. She was obviously embarrassed that for whatever reason, she had failed to address the situation before it became very potentially craptastic. I did tell my parents about it when I returned home, though, I remember that much.
* * *
A very good friend of mine remarked to me recently that I dressed much older than I am (colloquially, I basically dress like an old man, I suppose. To elaborate a bit, these days I prefer dress slacks and a polo shirt--gone are the days of concert T-shirts it seems...). This person meant no offense by that, and I took no offense to it either. I simply, and rather automatically responded that I wanted to dress respectably, like my father.
I thought on what I had said in that moment and remembered this story from my adolescence.
I told that story to some of my other friends, to which they responded "You're Dad is awesome."
I can tell you, he is indeed awesome and I love him.
* * *
These days, the month of August is a dead month for me. Under my current contract, I am not required to come to school. Concordantly, I am not paid for the month, either. In the last couple of years I've come to both love and hate August, to love it in the sense that I have all the time in the world to what I wish, to hate it in the sense that there is a vacuum of purpose to the whole affair.
It is in these lulls in purpose that I think on my life the most. It is in these lulls that I assess my level of satisfaction with my life. I spend the month thinking on the things in my life that I've done well, and those other things that I have not been so successful at. I try to remind myself of how capable a person I actually am, despite something inherent to my personality that doubts myself at every turn.
* * *
A couple of weeks ago I suddenly remembered that I am the 1996 Hawaii State Oxford Debate Champion. I was drinking with some friends, a rare occurrence indeed. And suddenly, I just blurted that out, as if it were something cool that someone else had done that I admired in some fashion. I don't know why I felt the urge to say that. Maybe I've felt very removed from all things academically English in all my time here in Japan. Perhaps some part of my subconscious felt that the conscious part needed some reminding. I'm not sure why I decided to make that announcement. What I think is true, though, is that some part of me needed to remember that I am capable of more than I think I am.
In my Sophomore year in high school, on the recommendation of my favorite teacher and a few others, I joined the Speech and Debate Team. I was more in it for the Speech/Theatrical aspects of it, however, the coach decided that I was much more effective as a debater. This did not appeal to me at all, as I have always been fairly loathe to argue with anyone. However, I did as I was told, and per our coaches well-informed predictions, I was successful at this whole structured-argument bit.
It was Oxford-style team policy debate. Basically, that's two teams of two, debating over the merits of a proposed change in policy. The enthymeme changed on a yearly basis, and the year that I was in it, the Resolution was something to the effect of "That the United States should significantly change its foreign policy towards the Peoples Republic of China." Not an easy resolution at all. Affirmative teams are free to interpret the resolution as they see fit and fashion their case around the definitions they choose, and the Negative team defends the effectiveness of the status quo. And amidst the 2ARs, cross-examinations, firm-yet-artificial handshakes, and high schoolers dressed in all manner of suits, there was some intellectual duking-out of policies that one might learn from if they could get through all that rhetoric to the idea that may or may not lie beneath.
My partner was Kevin Won. A brilliant debate tactician who sounded like a Chinese Beavis. It was a shame really--his ideas were solid, but he would always get ranked 4th out of 4 speakers on the ballots (this aspect of the ballots was mostly based on eloquence). I filled out the other end, being the PR guy, the silver tongue so to speak. Our typical tag team plan involved him telling me the ideas and me writing the speeches. It worked exceptionally well for us. But there were times when we were both floundering around at the podium, me talking bullshit out my ass without any solid ideas, and him, all solid concepts and ideas but screwing up the telling of it all. It was especially at times like these that I realized how necessary both of these things are in life in general.
We had a 95% winning average. When the both of us were on our game, we were badass motherfuckers. We became formidable enough to deserve a reputation in the Hawaii speech league. It was awesome, but there were obvious drawbacks.
For example, there was a girl from Castle High School who I had a bit of a crush on. But she hated me because every time we faced her in a debate round, we would win. Kevin and I were apparently her debate nemeses, and that pretty much ruined my chances with her. I even remember trying to find her after a tournament so I could ask her our, only to find that she was probably avoiding me. But, such is the nature of the beast.
Kevin and I were by no means an invincible pair. Our Achilles Heel manifested itself in the likes of a pair of witty fellows from Baldwin High School on Maui. Their names were Paul and John, and they had beaten us every time we debated against them. They became our arch nemeses. They were the faces pinned to the dartboard. They were the ones we hated, because they were the ones we feared the most.
By the State-wide competition, all the debate teams had pretty much faced each other once and had sized each other up sufficiently enough. We knew that in order to win the State tournament, we had to beat Paul and John. Being able to defeat them in a qualifying round would mean that everything else would be within our capabilities. And so, training montages aside, we focused only on being able to beat Paul and John, based on what we knew of their previous cases.
We were ready, and we were psyched. And upon reaching the parking lot of Moanalua High School were the state tournament was taking place that year, we spotted Paul and John in the parking lot and shat ourselves. Apparently we hadn't psyched ourselves enough.
As fate would have it, we did end up facing off against Paul and John during the semi-final rounds. At this point, the judges are counting fuck-ups on tally sheets, and every little thing counts. We came to the room, I had calmed down to the point where my nose was no longer bleeding, but then rather unexpectedly, Kevin began to panic. Up until now, he'd never done this.
I had to take him out of the room before the start of the round and give him a "forever winners or forever losers" speech. I said something to the effect of "This makes the most sense out of any of this! We've never won against this guys, not once! That's why it has to be NOW! We take them today, we take them now, and if we do, WE TAKE THEM FOR ALL TIME!" That seemed to do the trick.
It was midnight when they announced the final round participants. Paul and John were not among them, we'd taken them out in a flaming blaze of goddamn glory. Kevin and I had vindicated ourselves, and were one long step away from the prize. I exclaimed rather haphazardly to the girl I was sort of seeing at the time that I would bring her back a States trophy. She later presented me with the wall posting as a memoir.
I ran to the car and told my Dad who had been sleeping in the car in
the parking lot since he arrived sometime around 9 or 10 (we hadn't
anticipated that the tournament would last so long). I said something
like, "Dad, you gotta come see this--I might actually win the state
championship in debate."
The team Kevin and I were facing were from Kahuku. We'd never gone against them before, and subsequently, we'd never heard of them before. As it turns out, them and us had somehow got away with not debating each other the entire year. But apparently, our debate trainer, Grant Lee, told us that he'd seen these guys debate before, and that they could wipe the floor with him. Not the best thing to hear before going in to face them on the proverbial field of battle.
We went in nonetheless and did our thing. They did their thing as well. And in the heated exchange, a new word was created. Everyone involved in that debate made explicit use of the word "revocal" when in fact we meant "revocation." We had no idea until the judges' ballots came back and one of the judges, an actual chief justice of the something-or-other, wrote in large block letters "'REVOCAL' - THERE IS NO SUCH WORD!"
My father and I got home around 1:30am and my Mom was pissed. My Dad had turned off the cel phone during the debate, which lasted about an hour and a half, and my Mom had no idea where we were. I tried to tell her that I made it to the final round of the State finals but she just told me to microwave my beef stroganoff and eat. My Dad explained, but you know how these things go.
I ate my dinner finally at 2 in the morning while watching MTV. Oasis' "Champaign Supernova" was playing, introduced as a brand new video for the day. I wouldn't find out until the following night that Kevin and I had one the title State Champion, but I somehow define this moment of the story as the point when I felt most satisfied with what I had accomplished.
* * *
The other night over dinner with friends, I told them that over the course of this month's musings, I had finally decided to leave Japan. I told them that I had, in all likelihood, gotten as much out of this experience as I could have, and that it felt in many ways like it was time for me to level up.
One of my friends said, "Yeah, that's right--you're too talented to stay here."
It had not been the first time I've been told this, but for some reason, something hit me right then, and I started to lose my composure. Something about hearing it this time finally clicked in my head, and I felt it in my heart. He was right, and for the first time, I had actually agreed. I had let myself remember that I am a fairly talented person. I was shocked out how long I'd made myself deny that that was anything significant. Whether it was out of a need to be humble or to somehow blend into Japanese society, or whether it was because of some personal hang up from my shy and somewhat introverted childhood, I can't say. All I know is that hearing someone say that about me, to me, this time, something happened and I actually realized it without feeling that it was a bad thing.
* * *
The following day I watched Braveheart, relishing every moment of the movie. As a kind of side thought, I wondered why my favorite movies were movies like Braveheart, Gladiator, Shawshank Redemption. There is no denying that these are great movies on their own, but why was it that I liked them?
I know why I like Gladiator. Maximus as a character is a very principled individual. As quoted by Proximo in the movie itself, "I know that you are a man of your word, General. That you would die for honor, for Rome, for the memory of your loved ones." I truly admire the character of Maximus, and likewise, the way William Wallace and Andy Dufresnes' characters were written. There is something altogether phenomenal about these characters as people. We can relate to them in some manner, and they show us what massive potential we as humans have to do great things, no matter the circumstances. They are not saints, but they do amazing things, things that are not impossible, but things that you think no man is quite capable of, especially considering what's been laid against them in their respective stories.
Working against hundreds of years of oppression and tyranny, William Wallace exclaims "I will invade England!" when asked what his plan for defending Scotland will be. In a flash of genius and opportunity, Andy Dufresne transforms a lifetime death sentence of solitary confinement and virtual indentured servitude into the life of his dreams--"Andy Dufresne--who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side." Maximus Decimus Meridius--a man who after losing everything worth living for, finds one more important reason to fight--born again for only a few months, he accomplishes more than most do in a lifetime.
For all intents and purposes, all three of these people are fictional. But they are as much a vision of how we can be, what we are capable of, even when all seems stupid, cliche, flavorless and otherwise not worth the effort.
* * *
I finished the movie Braveheart that night and sat silently for a long, long time. I wondered about everything. I marveled at this man who once was, this force of will that affected so many lives around him, for better and worse. I wondered what it was I saw in him, why some part of me wanted to live as he did, and what was stopping me from being noble in that way. Nothing was stopping me. Nothing is stopping me.
There is a vast, empty freedom in realizing that nothing can really stop you from living as you wish. And at that moment I felt it, like the floor falling out from under my feet, the walls of my apartment blasting off into the distant dark nothing and there was naught but me, my thoughts, and this palpable feeling of sheer potential.
I thought about my life until that point. Things that I have done, and done well.
I thought about my life after Japan. Things that I would certainly love to try, ways I would like to live, the people I've not yet met whom I might be able to share my talents with, and enjoy their's with as well.
Sometimes it just blows my mind to think about the things that I havev done. If I could go back in time and speak with myself 10 years ago, my old self would NEVER have believed the current me.
"In ten years, you will be bilingual. You'll have lived in Japan for 5 years and actually lived as they do. You will have been the frontman of one of the best bands in the Osaka underground. You will have gone to the Tokyo Game Show cosplaying as one of the most popular anime characters in Japan, and in doing so, you will actually meet the voice actress from the show itself..."
Even thinking about those things now, some of it sounds surreal enough to feel as if I were talking about someone else's life.
I will, in these coming years, share with you the new things that I will try. But this time, I won't feel as much a need to apologize for doing so. I have to promise to myself that I will embrace who I am, without regret. There is a difference between arrogance and confidence that I have somehow confused all my life. There actually was a time in my life when I did live life to the hilt, for as much as I wanted to do that. I think that I want to get some of that back somehow.
I know I've already featured this song at some point before, but just the other day I was reading the wiki on this song and I came across this:
"During the fadeout the interlude repeats
five times with the backup vocalists singing, 'Keep it to yourself,
it's my life,' over the last eight intervals.
Also as the song fades out, Billy Joel can be heard making a puking
noise. It is possible that his ex-girlfriend (who he sings about in the
song) made him sick to his stomach by smothering him."
I just about puked with laughter upon reading this, but puking is never really kosher at the workplace, so I just kept it to myself ("it's my life").
While it is true that you can hear him making a "puking noise" during the end fadeout, it was fairly obvious that some fool just added the supposition that Billy Joel was puking in response to an oppressive girlfriend.
The comment has since been ammended on Wikipedia and is no longer written on the entry Not bad--it had only been a day or two since I had read that and gone back to harvest the quote for this entry. Consequently I had to dig around in the wiki history archives for said quote. But it was definitely worth it. Now, everytime I hear this song (which is quite often these days since I am laboring through it on the piano now), I will imagine Billy Joel hurling his guts out at the end of the song.
It's a very Billy-Joel-esque thing to do.
Other old puking songs:
"Science Fiction Double Feature" by Me First and the Gimee Gimees
Sadly, as far as other songs that have puking noises in them is concerned, this is the only one that I can think of off the top of my head.
