Politenessball: A Primer

Wrote this yesterday. Publishing it today. Tomorrow: who knows? Probably donuts.

I have seen some civil games of basketball in my time, but the game I watched at my new junior high school this afternoon was on a whole ‘nother level. I need to point out early on that this was my first day, so I knew literally nobody in the gym. There were about 35 teenage girls and three adults, all staring at me.

It’s lucky that everyone was so polite, because the first thing I did was to inadvertently go and sit right in the middle of the opposing team. So I’m introducing myself to a bunch of girls from who knows where, they’re asking the coach if I am her boyfriend, she’s trying to convince them I am and it’s all very confusing.

One awkward sidestep and mumbled explanation (Sorry girls you all seem nice enough and your coach is very friendly but you’re the wrong team sorry I’m sorry see you) during a time out later and I was finally where I was meant to be – with my team of absolute strangers – ready to watch some basketball!

But what I was introduced to was a close variation that I have named Politenessball.

Politenessball has similar rules to traditional basketball plus a shit-tonne more politeness.

Politenessball!

For example, when you sub on, your team mates fold your sweater twice and place it on your seat.

"Bro, you want me to fold that? Yeah, I better fold it."

When you come off again, remember to offer a small bow to the court for treating you so nice.

Even as a spectator you can still be of immense help to the team. Try yelling, “Safety” every once in a while. This help your active teammates to, um… be safe. Alternatively, you could shout “Lucky” when the opposing team cocks up. This is a great non-aggressive way of pointing out that the sloppy play and rampant misfortune of your opponents is really working out rather well for you, and that it has nothing to do with the superior sportsmanship of your team.

Entire Portland Trailblazers Blazers bench: "Lucky!"

I want you to take a moment to consider how beautiful a world it would be if NBA players showed each other the same consideration and incorporated some politenessball into their games.

Everything in the NBA is satisfactual, mister bluebird!

At one point a girl up and dropped the ball and it just sat there; no one from the opposing team scrambled to pick it up, no one from her team scrambled to pick it up, she sure as hell wasn’t going to pick it up again after shaming her ancestors by dropping it. Nobody called anybody else’s mother a whore. It was amazing.

In Politenessball, trash talking is when you ask what day the recycling goes out. I learned everything I needed to know about how to speak to my mother-in-law and my grandparents watching Politenessball.

Boom! Hey, your Mum seems like she raised you well. She's a nice lady.

So the ball’s just sitting there. No one on the bench is saying anything, not even “safety”. All I can do is look around with a deranged grin on my face wondering if this is really happening or if I’ve finally mastered the superpower of freezing time. For two delicious seconds the tension swelled like the pay packet of a starting forward.

References explained: He starts the game in the forward position and he's quite wealthy.

And then, as if a silent cue had been given, every girl in a 10m radius went for the ball at once. It was bananas. I’m assuming they only did it because they all realized simultaneously how impolite it would be to just leave the ball sitting there in the centre of the court and go home.

I felt like I finally reached a key understanding about Politenessball when I asked the girl sitting beside me how many members were in the team and she told me twenty-four.

"That reminds me of a puzzle!"

Your basketball team has 24 members, for Christ’s sake. For training, all members stand in a big circle and pass the ball clockwise from player to player around the circle. If it takes one second to pass the ball between each teammate, can each teammate touch the ball before the shot clock runs down?

If you answered “maybe” then your basketball team is double the recommended size!

Clearly Politenessball was instituted simply as a way to discourage lesser players from outright murdering the talented ones just to get some court time.

I hope they’re playing again tomorrow!

Monkey Money

I have broken my own record of tardiness (which, let me tell you, is established) by taking almost exactly one year to publish this fantastic piece of art. I'll let you drool on it and then provide a little backstory.

So every word of this conversation between myself and my OTE Ms Yasuda (the lady who makes sure that I know what I'm doing and that everyone else also knows what I'm doing) actually happened. I was so delighted by her responses to my - let's call a spade a spade - shit-stirring that I immediately went and posted the whole thing verbatim to Facebook.
When the amazing Ben McDonough read it, he immediately set to work on the amazing piece of art you see here. I have it framed on my wall, so I get to see it every day, but I've done Ben a tremendous injustice by neglecting to show his work to my single digit readership for so long. Thanks for the great stuff, Ben. Keep it up!
There is a sort of method to my madness however; I recently finished my work at the school where this event took place. They treated me so well there. Every day I had conversations and adventures like the one depicted above. (See Jitensha Adventure for further blogworthy hijinks at this school) The promise of a visit to this school on Friday was sometimes literally the only thing that got me through the week. So I post this today in honour of that school, and specifically Yasuda Sensei and Kawashita Sensei, two of my favourite people in this amazing, wacky country. Thank you for 2 fantastic years! I'll never forget you.

Mining for Coffee

I love coffee the same way that guy at your office who wears long sleeves in the summer loves heroin. Probably the thing that I miss the most from New Zealand is coffee. It’s not because you can’t get coffee here in Japan – far from it. It’s just… sigh. It’s just not the same. The most glaring difference is the widespread availability of coffee in cans. I’m not especially well travelled, so… is this a thing? Do countries other than Japan do this? Who came up with coffee in a can? It tastes terrible, like licking a steel-stringed guitar. Despite the fact that coffee plus can equals disaster, there are a plethora of options to choose from. I can only assume that originally the process for making coffee was incorrectly translated into Japanese, leaving them with the impression that you had to involve mining somehow.

Best enjoy that coffee, boy. We lost six good men and one Chinee gettin' it fer ya.

I recently made two purchases which have revolutionised life in the miserable frigid Japanese winter. The first was a Nespresso coffee maker. It takes these little bullet things that are full of coffee. So it’s kind of like a shotgun, but the shots give life instead of taking it.

Sometimes George Clooney just pops by. It's that good.

The second was a thermos so I can draw my caffeinated bliss out for an entire workday.

In honour of the fact that I no longer have to metallic canned shit, I present to you suckas who do a well rounded appraisal of several products in the coffeeminium range that Japan seems to be pioneering. I decided to test a cross sample of canned coffees to see whether they all tasted like waste by-products of Johnny 5.

"Has anyone seen my waste expulsion canister?"

To that end, I asked some of the top Japanese coffee scientists to report on the coffee to metal ratio in each of the following cans of coffee. Then I realised that none of them had the intellectual resourcefulness to question whether roasted coffee beans and aluminium were complimentary tastes, so I ignored those reports and made up my own stats. As I understand from watching the Fukushima reactor news coverage this is how hard hitting reporting usually works anyway. In addition to estimating the coffee to metal ratio I will also give the product a rating for its Engrish content, since most companies will attempt to use Engrish to help sell their product. I can’t decide if unintelligible Engrish should constitute a high score or a low score. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Wheeeee!

Wonda Gold Premium 

Coffee to Metal Ratio: 1:6
This coffee tasted like being punched in the mouth by Atomu. It would be better off being called Wonka Gold Premium, because it’s like a hilariously irreverent food joke being played on you by a hilariously insane factory owner.

"...And then in that tube we add the metal! Don't get too close, Augustus."

Engrish: “GOLD is a Premium Coffee with a Radiant-like Beauty Perfected With Premium Beans.” Engrish Rating: This looks more like a song title than a descriptive sentence. Hey, Wonda. I know when someone is trying to Blind Me With Capital Letters, alright? You also probably don’t get to use the word premium twice if your can costs 80 yen – two thirds of the standard price for a capsule of coffee-flavoured metal. Partly for its use of the ridiculous term ‘radiant-like’, but mostly for its abuse of capitals, I have to award this effort a score of “It’s your life listen to your FUCK Heart” out of 10. (Best t-shirt I ever saw, by the way)

 Roots Creamy Café Café au Lait

Coffee to Metal Ratio: 0:4
Roots have an elegant solution to the problem of coffee and metal not tasting great together: remove the coffee. They wrote coffee on the can in at least two languages, but I swear there was none in the can. It didn’t taste bad, per se. But it didn’t taste like coffee either. Unfortunately, milkshake in a can is beyond the scope of this blog, so I can’t say much more about Roots Creamy Café au Lait.
Engrish: “The Waist-Wave Can provides optimum heat control combined with the HTST PROCESS in the pursuit of the authentic coffee flavour.” I have no idea what this means, but in this case it seems like that was intentional.
Engrish Rating: This is actually some good English with an L. Therefore, I give it a score of “Let’s enjoy English” out of 10.

Sumiyaki Coffee 

Coffee to Metal Ratio: 3:5
This one tasted like it could have been coffee before it was unceremoniously sentenced to alloyed purgatory.
Engrish: ‘This coffee is made with pure water. We roasted coffee beans by charcoal. You will have a relaxing and refreshing time (with the added goodness of aluminium for a hardy constitution).’ (The brackets are my suggested addition to this slogan.)
Engrish Rating: “Let’s coffee! YES YOU BEAUTY GIRL. We rest ourselves together. If it converses, we see the same things probably. We are have the starting of most happy relations.”

Special Mention! W Coffee Black The Hard 

Coffee to Metal Ratio: ??
For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to put this in my mouth, but I heard from some ladies that once you go this coffee you never go back.
Engrish Rating: Kind of porno

Look to the Future!

I’ve achieved a lot since I came to Japan. I can read katakana like a boss. I’ve eaten the entire Big America series of hamburgers from McDonalds. I saw a Rock act that wouldn’t have bothered coming to New Zealand. I’ve made a rainbow coalition of friends and taught 4 schools that learning English is 60% practice and 40% reckless insanity.
But I recently hit a big milestone in my life. I’ve heard it described as ‘the dirty 30s’ which sounds awesome because I was well sick of showering. I managed to combine my birthday party with achieving a goal of mine that has been boiling in my soul for half a lifetime. I was told more than once that it was the best night out some people had ever had. That's not good news, because that means I've peaked. Where do I go from here!? Well, it seemed like a good opportunity to quickly revise my goals for life in Japan and in general for the coming year. If you have any to add, I am happy to take them under advisement. But please remember, this is my life we’re talking about.
So nothing ridiculous.

My Goals for the Future (in no particular order)

1. Successfully petition Ghibli Studio’s to make an anime about my life. I alright wrote the script. It can be found at www.peeweethekiwi.blogspot.com
2. Ride one of those car elevator things. Whether I’m in a car or not is entirely inconsequential.

3. Photograph a Japanese person at the exact moment I bikuri shita (big surprise) their face by daring to be not Japanese.

Just one gaijin can be all it takes to cause a 'dropped pancake face' epidemic.

4. Bejewel something I own completely. Bejewel it to the extent that were it an animal that animal would asphyxiate.
5. Purchase either a turtle or women’s underpants from a vending machine. A turtle wearing women’s underpants is worth double points. Then bejewel the shit out of it.

One of these has to have a turtle in it.

6. Start a charity that donates used stools to underprivileged “stand up” noodle bars.

 Preliminary slogan idea: Stand up against seatlessness. Donate your stool.
7. Fight an oni to death in the forest.

Pretty much one comment about his Mum should be enough to start some shit.

8. Form my own Visual Kei band. Call it Six 14 Happy Riot Parfait Mega.

Visual Kei means never having to say you're sorry.

I don’t want to overextend myself, so I will leave it at eight for now. What are your goals for this year?