Gallery Exertions
Week 24
Ah, another week down.
This particular assemblage of 7 days contained an atypical set of events the section usually dedicated to work, which is always a nice change of pace.
The abnormal sections of this week began on Wednesday when Kayoko and I were accosted by one of her students and escorted downstairs to an art gallery that occupies the basement floor of our building.
This was surprising.
I had no idea the gallery was there. I guess that's one of the downsides of being mostly illiterate in this country. But seriously, complete question mark. I've been working in this building for nearly 6 months now and all of a sudden I find out the basement has an art gallery. That's kind of surprising. Not as surprising as the first time you discover that, with the right deftness of touch, you can separate the two halves of an Oreo cookie and eat the filling without the cookie, but still pretty surprising.
I'm eating Oreos while I write this.
The gallery was exhibiting the work of local painters, who had set brush to canvas with the subjects of a notably floral persuasion as their focus. One of the painters happened to be the wife of one of my students. My student's wife is also an acquaintance of Kayoko's student, the very same student which escorted us so enthusiastically downstairs. Upon our arrival, my student's wife was elated. What followed was a long conversation mostly in Japanese. My student's wife was very funny, despite my incomprehension of the language she was speaking. Kayoko translated a few choice tidbits too. Great stuff, really energetic lady. We took a few photos with her portraits (she has a really nice camera!) and then chatted some more. Her husband showed up a few minutes later, which was a nice coincidence, so I got to chat with him a bit before teaching him that night. Kayoko and I took our leave a few minutes later in order to go and get some dinner.
When my student showed up later that night he brought along the pictures that his wife took of us. Ah the miracles of digital photography! They're nice pictures too! I'm sending them back to Canada first chance I get.
My Friday was a little bit unusual too. This week we were teaching the Halloween lessons to our kids classes, which was a nice opportunity to take a bit of a break. Vocabulary was pretty easy and fun to teach, stuff like 'Werewolf' or 'Ghost'. On Friday though, things were a bit different. My high level KH class (8-10) came in all dressed up for Halloween, which was pretty awesome. I got to teach Peter Pan, Dracula and a Witch. Oh, and a Montreal Canadians Fan...One of my students left too early last week to hear about the costumes. We had to improvise...
Due to my costume being stolen (see above mentioned early departing student), I ended up throwing on a Manchester United Jersey and going as Sean. I'm not sure the kids got it, but I think it was more about them getting dressed up than the teacher...
The rest of the week proceeded apace. No real hiccups, just the usual 11-or-so hours a day. It certainly makes for a fairly exhausting work week, let me tell you.
Sunday was the only day of note for this weekend. Events would transpire that would prevent Monday from containing any interesting activities...But I digress. Sunday was...
Sean's Birthday Party!
I woke up Sunday morning to a bad sign...a bit of a sore throat, the beginnings of a cold. Eh, no matter, had to soldier on through it.
I met up with the party's attendees on the train. We were headed for an area of Tokyo called Odaiba, which is located in Tokyo's Harbor area. Odaiba is fairly unusual in that it's almost completely constructed on reclaimed land. Odaiba also acts as the location for a very peculiar amusement park: Muscle Park!
The concept for this 'park' is based around engaging in physical activities. According to the website, this is to counteract the increasingly virtual types of entertainment preferred by children these days. So that's basically all it is, a bunch of physical activities. They're pretty diverse though, ranging from kicking a soccer ball at a target, to seeing how long you can maintain your balance, to shooting at prizes with a popgun.
We started off by taking a general agility/balance/coordination test. The wonderful part about this particular set of activities was that in the end it spits out the theoretical physical age of your body. This was a fortuitous coincidence considering the occasion that brought us to the rather inconspicuous 5th floor location of Muscle Park.
As it turned out Sean and I tied in this section...apparently we're both 58 years old. Also, sadly, we were the youngest of the group according to this test. I question the test's scientific validity, however.
The next few hours were filled with a variety of challenges. The most interesting of these by far in my opinion (and also the most difficult) is the much-touted Sasuke section. Sasuke, or Ninja Warrior as it is known in North America, is a television show in which contestants compete at insanely grueling physical challenges. These challenges are so grueling in fact that most of the contestants on the show will usually be eliminated in the first set of challenges.
Muscle Park is kind enough to provide the average person the opportunity to compare their physical skills with the nearly super-mutant levels of vim exhibited by the athletes on the show.
As it turns out, average people compare poorly.
There were 4 different events in the short Sasuke circuit at muscle park. The first is the overhead bike, wherein you basically hang from the pedal assembly of a bike and pedal with your arms across a five or six meter stretch.
The second activity is aptly named "Cliffhanger". It consists of a very narrow piece of wood nailed to a suspended steel backing. The backing itself is about 2 feet tall and cuts off about 6 feet above the floor. The idea is that you grip mostly with your finger tips and palms and shimmy across the 5 meter game that way. This was the most difficult event in my opinion. Of all the people in our group and everyone else that tried it while we were waiting in line, not one person managed to move from one grip position to another without falling. The grip-wood is so narrow that you really can't get a proper grip on it without serious experience. Hell, it's difficult just to support yourself on the thing to begin with.
The third activity was also pretty impossible. Basically you had to do a chin-up on a bar that is not attached to anything. Instead it rests in the lowest of a set of three suspended brackets. The idea is that you heave yourself and the bar up to the next set of brackets twice...There's gotta be some kind of ancient ninja technique for this, because I have no idea how you're supposed to accomplish it without some kind of telekinesis.
The final challenge is a pair of overhead rails that have a number of dips and rises in them as well as perpendicular offshoots that extend above the rail. The prospective ninja warrior has to grab two rings that loop around the rails and move from one side of the rail to the other, again while hanging in mid-air. This one seemed as though it might have been the easiest, if not for the fact that you're already exhausted after attempting the other challenges.
I guess I was pretty happy with my performance. I managed to complete the air bike section, but completely whiffed the middle to. I made it about 1/4 of the way across on the 4th. I guess that was about an average performance. That's some tough stuff though.
Once Sasuke had finished completely belittling us, we went off to Monster Burger, the resident fast food restaurant in Muscle Park.
Think about this for a second.
Fast food restaurant in pro-physical health amusement park.
Yeah, doesn't make much sense to me either, especially considering that the Monster Burger, the flagship burger of the restaurant, is in fact 3 sandwiches stacked...A chicken burger, a hamburger and a BLT. Needless to say, I didn't finish mine.
It's almost like the restaurant is designed to replace all the calories you've burned off in the last couple hours, completely negating any health benefits you may have accrued through your hard work. Strange. I would have expected a health food place.
Then an entirely different possibility occurred to me.
Perhaps the restaurant is meant to close some kind of loop. Fat is burned throughout the course of your stay at Muscle Park and then immediately restored when lunch time rolls around. This thereby creates a closed loop and ensures continuous patronage of the establishment. People never get more physically fit and the difficulty of the activities is such that you would have to extremely well conditioned to perform well. This is on top of the inherent difficulty of each of the games the first time through. Maybe this is thinking too deeply on the matter, but seriously, the Monster Burger is the only food I've seen in 6 months that looks like it might have been portioned out in an American restaurant.
I also made something that I prefaced with the ominous disclaimer: "I'm about to making a sweeping generalization on Japanese society and culture." The following was uttered after the disclaimer:
The nature of the games in Muscle Park reminded me of a common gameplay feature in many Japanese-developed video games. Muscle Park's activities are far to difficult to master on the first time through. In this sense, activities like the agility/balance/coordination tester cannot present a truly accurate representation of your physical conditioning without many, many repeated visits. One test simply isn't enough, thus making the initial results inherently inaccurate. This is similar to Japanese RPG design. In order to truly experience all the content the majority of these games offer, you have to play through it numerous times, despite the extreme length of the game (as much as 40-80 hours in some cases). This focus on repetition on a task that should really only require one iteration may not be entirely pervasive in Japanese society, but it certainly does seem to pop up from time to time. Perfection seems at times to be absolutely integral to certain aspects of recreation in Japanese culture. Or maybe again, looking too deeply into this.
We did a couple more games before we left. The most interesting one was a team game. Two people stand on opposite sides of a model of downtown Tokyo. There is a model train that runs around the perimeter of the model and, most importantly, two removable sections of track which are mounted on sliding boards. These two boards are each manned by one of the people participating in the challenge. Beneath the sliding board is a small cavity filled with square blocks. The concept is simple: take the blocks out and stack them into a tower. The problem is that you are not allowed to touch or modify the positioning of the blocks when the drawer is closed. You have to slide your section of the track out in order to get the blocks and to build your tower, then close it in time to stop the train from derailing when it gets back to your section. Oh, you also have to build your tower on the sliding track segment, and if that topples, you lose as well. Yeah, and there's a 3 minute time limit.
Pretty tough.
Tuan and I gave it a shot, and we came out pretty well. Ended up close to finishing our towers, but we ran out of time. Close, but no cigar.
And this was where things took a turn for the worse.
I had intended to go back to Toyoda with Sean and everyone to play a round of poker. Unfortunately, my cold was starting to seriously fuck me up. I had a splitting headache at this point and was beginning to feel a fever coming on.
By the time we left Muscle Park and Odaiba I was in seriously bad shape. I had to duck out of poker. The train ride from Tokyo station to Musashi-Koganei basically involved me resting my head in my arms and trying to fall asleep but failing to due to the headache.
The walk home from the station was torturous. I had my hood up and was shivering like crazy, probably looking something like an unusually fashionable meth-addict. This walk also had one of life's bizarre little coincidences nicely wrapped in it. I ran across one of my students from my very, very young children's class (3-5 years old). My head was bent over so I think she was the only member of her family that recognized me...I gave a little wave as I went past and hoped that I didn't look too much like a zombie. I bought a bunch of Vitamin C packs at the 7/11, made it home, and quickly hopped into my futon shivering like crazy and went to sleep.
The next day was tons of fun. I sat in front of my computer for about 14 hours trying not to move my head because it would instantly give me a terrible headache. I spent nearly the entire time playing World of Warcraft. Sad, I know, but god damn, I felt like crap, and additionally bad for bailing on Sean's poker game. What a shame.
Well, that was that week. What a disappointing ending...
Once again, this is a (still recovering)
Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello
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