棒に振る青春

I’ve been killing a lot of time recently with two things: Teaching, and stick fighting.

I registered with SenseiBank.com and FindaTeacher.net, and after a week or so ended up with two students. One is a guy from Myanmar who I think is gay and is trying to hit on me. The other is a giggly OL who, like every other Japanese woman over 25, loves Korean TV dramas. His English is good; hers not so much. They’re both hard to teach in their own ways.

During a lesson with the OL at Starbucks one night, we were interrupted by a woman sitting nearby who, it turns out, also wanted English lessons. On top of that, I help teach my friend’s ex’s mother’s neighbors’ kids. Kids are fun because they can’t pay attention for more than 10 minutes straight.

The best part of teaching is that I make $20 per hour (which is actually very cheap for English teachers, apparently) to make basic conversation. I am completely honest with all my students that I have no certifications or formal training, and very little experience. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m white and I speak English natively. If I spoke French I’d be able to have sex with my students too. If you want to teach English in Japan, honestly, I think you should learn French first and teach that instead. The English market is much closer to being saturated here; if you speak French you can really clean up.

The other thing I’m doing is 棒術. I’ve never seriously done a martial art before, so I’m really fumbling my way through it. Luckily there are plenty of other newbies who suck just as bad. I try to go to practice three times per week, but I usually end up skipping one of them. When I do go, it’s a very intense (by my standards) workout for two to three hours. We do plenty of warmup exercises, lots of empty-handed moves similar to 空手, and of course we use sticks.

For some reason a lot of people don’t really get it when I say “stick fighting.” Some picture something like 剣道 or 長刀, or even baseball(???). To give you a better idea of what it is, imagine the ugly red-faced bad guy from Star Wars Episode 2 (yes, it sucked, but I bet you saw it anyway). Apparently he’s an accomplished practitioner of 棒術.

Because of 棒術, my feet are falling apart. I’ve had countless blisters, and just today I noticed that I had a blister inside the remains of another blister. I made the mistake of cutting the raised skin off of it, and you can see the red meat of my foot underneath. By the time I go home I’ll probably have rubbed off so many layers of flesh that you can see my foot bones.

]]>