TheLeong.com

I made the mistake this evening of turning on the TV. As I was flipping through the channels, I landed on NHK, the national public station. NHK is a lot different from traditional PBS stuff we see in the US, primarily because people actually watch it. There are, however, a lot of trash programs on the station, including educational ones. I think I’ve complained before about my intense hate for the English educational shows on Japanese TV. Tonight may have been the worst I’ve seen, primarily because of this mega flamboyant possibly transvestite foreign teacher:

Yikes is right. I’ve uploaded some poor-res video clips of this show on Youtube. Links are at the end of this post. You can probably imagine how freakishly strange this “guy” sounds, but it’s even worse than that. Please listen for yourself. Although he looks like Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, his voice is much, much higher.

The show is part of the Koukou Kouza series (NHK高校講座), which seems to have all kinds of lessons in different subjects targeted at high school students. I guess this show is actually for retarded high school students, because they have a teacher who speaks around 1 word a minute, and has to resort to extreme body and facial movements to keep your attention as he tries to get a full sentence out. Speaking of retarded high school students, check out the third video I uploaded from this show; not only do the kids speak English like they have speech impediments, but the conversation has no real logical flow either. The entire show is sentence repetition and basic conversations, which all in all isn’t that bad. My main beef with the show was the foreign host, who acts more like a clown that a teacher and doesn’t sound natural at all. If you spoke like that to a real native speaker, they’d laugh at you and walk away.

Of course I understand that you have to speak slowly and clearly for learners of English to understand you; I do it on a daily basis. However, this guy takes it over the top and deserves to be punched in the face for the way he acts. Most high school students don’t need to be spoken to this slowly. The students on the show, for example, spoke a lot faster and don’t need him breaking up every word into its own galaxy. Stop patronizing these people. I worry when I think about people actually watching these shows and thinking they’re going to learn how to speak English from someone like Mimi on TV here.

This guy’s name is Brian Wistner. After doing some hardcore research, by which I mean 1 page of Google search results, it seems as if this guy teaches English at some Christian college in Tokyo, and has also co-authored a book on taking TOEIC. Let’s hope for the sake of his customers and students that his on-camera persona is some kind of self-degrading joke, and he doesn’t really act, speak, or write like he does on the show. Something tells me that’s not the case though. I still can’t stand how pretty much every foreign co-host of these English shows on Japanese TV is a major toolbag. Yes, I said co-host, because I have yet to see a program that is hosted by a lone foreigner. There’s almost always a Japanese person there to lead the action, and that Japanese person usually speaks perfect English without acting like a high-school drama club reject. Hey NHK, here’s an idea: ditch the crap foreigners and just let these Japanese people host the shows.

Here are some clips of tonight’s show, in case you’re curious as to why this stuff annoys me so bad. I used my camera to take video off the TV, then posted them to YouTube, so obviously the quality is terrible. You can still watch them though.

• Clip 1 – Watch Mimi-sensei spell out a sentence as if he were teaching a dog how to drive a Jeep.
• Clip 2 – Another one!? Now he goes and talks to some Australian woman. This is the most awkward conversation using What’s up ever recorded on camera.
• Clip 3 – Since the program was so awful, the kids didn’t learn anything. She’s hungry. Heading home now. Pork chop sandwiches? Duuuuuur.

The title of this entry is a lot more boring than what rubbish I would usually make up, but I have a lot I’d like to write and not a lot of time as I’m disgracefully already tired at 11:30PM. I’d also like to point out that I may very well be risking my job everytime I write a blog entry, because I seem to remember stuff in training and in our manuals about not giving away AEON secrets and also one about not badmouthing the company. I’ll try not to do any of those explicitly, but I’m sure they’ll turn up on a semi-regular basis. But who cares? I’m not going to stop my mad blogging, and you’re not going to stop reading. Why? Because the internet is a good way to kill time in-between sleeping sessions, that’s why.

I’ll be honest, I won’t be able to cover all my sweet stories, observations, and complains in this one entry. It’s been what, almost a week since I posted anything of substance? I’m far too tired to write a lot. I’ll catch you up on whatever I miss at a later date.

Flew out of the US last Thursday, which was the 7th. Arrived at Narita airport the afternoon of Friday the 8th, but it was quite a comfortable ride in the time machine. I flew United, and my only big complaints were that there wasn’t as much legroom as I’ve had on other airlines, and they didn’t have the personal video screens. Aside from that, I had one of the greatest flights ever because the plane was only around 60 or 75% full, and there was no one sitting directly next to me. I was able to do my normal routine of staying up the entire night before packing and sleeping almost 7 hours of the 12 hour flight to Tokyo. When I was awake, I would listen to my iPod or watch videos on it like the first episode of Psych (which is pretty good). The secret to getting through customs quickly, at least in Japan, seems to be rushing off your plane to the customs line. I did it this time and also last month, and both times I made it to the line close to the front, with only a 10 minute wait ahead of me. Immediately after I get there, the rest of my flight AND 2 planes full of other people show up. If I were to get stuck in that, my wait would probably be an hour or more.

Met up with one of the AEON trainers, and once we had a group of 5, the last people to arrive for the day, we headed to Omiya and the training center. We took a Skyliner express train to Nippori, then took regular trains on the Keihin-Touhoku line up to Omiya. Then took a cab from there to the center. It was like 2 hours of commuting, but we were finally where all the magic begins. And by that I mean where we would be sleeping, training, and being turned into robots for the week. Toured the place, got settled in, met the other people in our training group (there are 18 of us teacher trainees total), and then training started the next day. I’ll get to that soon. Sunday we had a day off, so I headed down to Akihabara with Brian to look at the normal stuff, eat sushi, and marvel at all the freaks (maids) that are taking over that town. We also went to Yodobashi Akiba for the first time, which I swear is the largest store I’ve ever been in. Largest electronics store for sure. It’s about 9 stories tall, with each floor bigger than a Wal-Mart. They have about anything electronic or not within this massive building. Seriously, this place puts Best Buy to shame. I guess since all the maids and otaku are taking over that area, they figured they needed something to keep Akihabara the electronics capital of town.

Training for the most part isn’t bad, but it’s majorly exhausting. We go everyday from about 10:30AM to 7 or 8PM, and that doesn’t even include the 3+ hours of demo lesson prep and homework that we have to do every night. It’s tough work preparing lessons, and everything follows the very specific and detailed AEON methods of teaching. They have this stuff down to a science, for real. During the day, we usually have a lot of lecture sessions, demo lessons, and we practice our stuff. Today and yesterday, we had real AEON students come and be our guinea pigs, so that we could practice our shortened lessons on them. I did a lot better tonight than I did yesterday, and it’s all starting to make sense to me. The hardest part is just remembering and following all the steps in my lesson plan. The main thing that’s making this week bearable is the rest of the trainees. I was afraid before getting here that we’d have a terrible group, full of the typical Japanophiles, otaku, and regular social ingrates. I also got to sample the JET people last month at the Keio, and good lord those people sucked hard. My group here at AEON is way sweet, so it makes things easier. We’re usually exhausted after training, but we’ll go get dinner, talk smack about everything, then head back to do our lesson plans.

The trainers here are great, although I have noticed something about all the long-term AEON staff I’ve encountered so far: their speech has been permanently impeded. They’re all (OK, fine, most of them) so used to teaching English to Japanese people that their language is slow and choppy all the time, even when talking to other native speakers. I’m going to use all of my power to make sure this doesn’t happen to me this year, so don’t worry. I’ll still be the same fast-talking, sarcastic jerk that I always am. Also I won’t talk to you like you’re a retard.

Training goes until this Friday, then we have a 3-day weekend. I think it’s “Be Nice to Old People Day” again or something. Either way, 3 days off is awesome. Then on Tuesday, we all wake up early and distribute throughout the eastern/northern Japan areas to our branch schools. We already got our school schedules and apartment information, and I’m pretty happy. The schedules at AEON, as I knew beforehand, are pretty easy. I have Sundays and Mondays off, and even during the week I have a lot of breaks. I usually work from like 10 or 11AM to 7 or 8PM, but with the long-ass breaks in there this shouldn’t be too bad. I live less than 2 minutes away from AEON and the train station, so you can’t beat the convenience there. The place is like 23 square meters big, which is tiny by American standards but not bad for a Japanese studio. It’s definite bigger than my apartment last summer in Myoden, which is all I really cared about. If you want my address, e-mail or Facebook msg me. I was going to post it here, but since I have a suspicion about a certain A-Team stalker, I’ll keep it private. Snake!

That’s all for now I guess; my eyes are closing on their own which means I need to sleep. I’m actually on a “normal” sleep schedule here, which is weird to me since I’m used to going to bed at 5 and waking up in the afternoon. Now I usually wake up at like 6 or 7AM. Tomorrow I need to get up to plan a lesson, which is the last one we have to plan for training. This might sound like a complicated task, but it’s mainly coloring pictures and filling in blanks on a lesson plan sheet of paper. Then you practice it so you know what to say, and bam. A lot of people were downstairs working on theirs, but I’m lazy and I instead went upstairs to steal wireless and write a ridiculously long blog entry. Goooood night.

I am writing this blog in the presence of Ashley Thoms, who is a retard.

I read my first book of the summer on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, Dave Barry Does Japan. Nick suggested it and let me borrow it, and it looked pretty funny from the description on back, so I read the whole thing in less than a day. It’s short, but pretty funny, even if you aren’t that interested in Japan or anything. Pretty much, he scammed his way into getting a free trip to Japan for 3 weeks with his family, and wrote a book about it. This guy is like my idol!

I’m not going to really review the book, but I will suggest it to anyone who wants something quick to read. The Amazon link is here. I will, however, post part of the book (don’t sue me Dave Barry), that shows how Dave Barry explains business negotiations in Japan. It’s pretty dead on, I’d say.

OK so wow; I haven’t made a really substantial update on here in a long time. I’m sure that all three people out there in the world who read this blog constantly (all of whom I have probably never met) are just grinding their teeth wondering “what has become of Mr. Anthony Leong?!” Well, internet-stalkers, here we go, with a giant update of the last three weeks or so of my life.

I left Japan on July 28th. While I was planning on pulling an all-nighter before my flight, I accidentally fell asleep for longer than planned and had to rush to finish up all the packing and stuff in the morning. To make a long (and slightly funny yet slightly embarrassing) story short, I made it to Narita airport only about 30 minutes before take-off, thus missing my flight. After a few hours of waiting around at the airport, hanging out with Yuji, unsuccessfully waiting on stand-by for two flights to the US, they decided to transfer me to Singapore Air. This was actually a better deal for me, since it was a lot nicer than what United would have been. So I made my way to Los Angeles via airplane, got to sleep most of the way, watched some movies and TV on the flight. The nice thing about Singapore Air was that all the programming on the personal TVs (every seat has their own, as do most nice international planes) was on-demand. I don’t know if I’ve ever had this before. But instead of waiting for the movie you want to watch to finish then start-up again, you just use the remote and access what you want to watch. I watched an episode of Frasier and one of Arrested Development, saw the I, Robot movie that wasn’t as bad as I expected, and watched the first half of Kung-Fu Hustle. This was all after I slept for about 8 hours, having not slept much the night before.

After I finally made it to LA, I had a bit of time before my flight back to St. Louis. I got stopped by some Indian guy (from India, not native American), and he tried to get me to donate to his cult or whatever in exchange for some books about Indian religion. I lied (of course) and said I didn’t have much cash on me, and ended up giving him only like 120 yen and still got one of his weird little books. Nice omiyage, I guess. After that I got on a plane to StL and things were good. Now for another funny story: I’m sitting on the plane and hear the lady next to me talking about her son who graduated from Northwestern, something about law, something about marines, etc. Since I spent so much time in Japan this time watching Detective Conan, I think my detective skills were pretty polished or something, and I figured out that the lady sitting next to me flying to St. Louis was Bryan Reynolds’ (from IES Fall) mom! Wow what a weird coincidence. But his mom was busy talking, and I was really tired, so I went to sleep for most of the four hour flight. I woke up and near the end of the flight asked his mom if she was who I thought, and I was correct. Conan would be proud. And I did it without a bow-tie, stun-gun watch, and a crazy Professor friend. Well, that was a mystery solved. And thus I was back in America.

I only spent about three days back at home in St. Louis. I actually really liked it, even though I didn’t even leave the house for two whole days. My sleep schedule was still pretty messed up, but it was nice relaxing at home for a bit. I think I must be getting older or something but just sitting at home or hanging out with my parents is pretty nice nowadays. On Saturday morning I left with my parents to hit the road back to Indiana. I had to move out of my old apartment by the end of the month, which was kind of a pain in the butt as I would have rather just loafed at home for longer, but oh well. Spent all weekend moving and stuff from one apartment to the other with my parents, and that was that. I’m living in a new place now, it’s really nice. The set up is different from the old place, and while I think the new living room leaves a bit less space to have people over, it’s definitely better for me just being lazy by myself, which I probably do the most. And it’s not like I ever have masses of people over anyways, so it’s good.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been back in Bloomington for over two weeks now. Things have seemed to just fall back into place like I never left. My schedule for now is really easy. The only thing I do every day is go work on IUSTV stuff at the office from around 1 to 4PM. Starting tomorrow, though, I’m having more important meetings, etc, so I suppose things will get a bit more intense. Hanging out with everyone (who’s back) has been great; I think senior year is going to be a lot of fun. I got the new Katamari game, and it’s awesome. I beat it in like two days, but like the first one, there’s so much replay value that you never really “beat” the game. I’m not especially looking forward to the start of classes, well at least not for the actually class work, but I guess there’s no real choice for that.

Well I think that’s a pretty decent entry. I do have to say, my life isn’t exactly amazingly exciting, but I’m going to keep doing this blog thing for a long time I think. I’ve said before that I don’t really care who reads this. I’m sure some friends and stuff read it, but mainly I think the reason I have this is so I can look at it a bit down the line and just see what I’d been doing, what I was thinking, etc. A journal or something like that, although it’s also fun to post up stupid stuff for other people to see. It seems like a few more people I know have blogs nowadays, so those are always fun to read when I’m bored. Now it’s time to plan a bit for my first Exec meeting of the fall IUSTV semester. I’m really in charge now, so it’s a good and weird feeling. That’s about it for now, I’m watching Iron Chef and just loafing around. Life is good, summer has been great, and this entry has officially become way to freaking long.

I`m going tonight to eat some Fugu fish with Ari and his bro, I think. Hopefully there won`t be poison in it and I won`t die. If something goes wrong, this is the last post ever.

Haha this is supposed to be funny, not morbid. I`m sure it will be safe….right?

OK, I’m here until Thursday. Pretty much the only things I have to do are pack, film a bunch of b-roll of Tokyo, IES, and school, do a few more long interviews for the video, hang out with people, and leave. Sounds simple, but I have a feeling the next few days are going to be as busy as can be. If anyone wants me to bring them anything back, let me know in the next day or two.

Oh, and you’re all invited to a celebrate Halloween this year at Indiana University, “central point of the America,” sponsored by the A-Team. Turn-A, seriously.