FARPLANE 2012 - Just another night in Osaka...

OK, so this wasn’t just another night in Osaka, this was the annual Farplane get together in Osaka which put simply is one fucking crazy night!

Hosted by the Farplane store in American Village, the annual event attracts an eclectic collection of the most eccentric individuals in Osaka who come together for a night of diverse music, dancing, and stage entertainment. I heard about Farplane through a friend of a friend and after watching a video of last year’s event I was a little sceptical about getting a ticket, the truth is this isn’t the kind of night out I’m used to going to, I’ve lived in rural England most of my life after all. But in the end I parted with 3000 yen and got my hands on an advanced ticket.

In a room full of what most people would describe as being utterly overdressed I was predictably underdressed wearing jeans and a shirt, but then, it’s not often you can share a room with a man covered head to toe in gold paint, wearing nothing but a strap on penis and yet still feel like the odd one out.

The party started at 4 in the afternoon and went through to 11pm with stage entertainment throughout the day and night hosting everything from DJ sets and dance acts to performers being suspended above ground from hooks attached to their backs and necks. The latter was actually a pretty weird thing to witness but most people around the stage seemed to enjoy it and even those being suspended seemed reasonably happy about the whole thing so who am I to criticise. This was just one part of a long night of diverse entertainment though and if there was a performance you didn’t like you could bet there would be something along before long that you did. It was a night like no other and something few outsiders get the chance to experience. If I’m still in Osaka this time next year I’ll make sure I’m at the next Farplane, only next time I’ll make sure I have a decent outfit to wear!

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

My home for the past six weeks

Since I arrived in Japan a little over 6 weeks ago I’ve been living at my girlfriend Eri’s house. We live in a part of Osaka called Hanaten, situated in a fairly sleepy corner of the city a short train ride from the central district of Umeda. Although relatively small it has everything I could ask for right on my doorstep; there’s a great little bakery, a convenience store and an off-licence literally across the road from the house. Unlike much of Osaka, Hanaten has managed to starve off the commercial progress that has taken over elsewhere and has maintained a very local feel with an abundance of small family run businesses that have clearly been operating for many decades. The majority of the residents give an impression that they have lived here their whole lives and it’s always quite amusing walking from the station to the house and seeing the looks of surprise on their faces when they see me pass by. The schoolchildren are especially excited, often greeting me with open mouthed shock as their mothers try to stop them staring. Clearly there aren’t too many other white people living in Hanaten.

Although not totally organised before coming to Japan I did have a rough plan of what I hoped to achieve and as enjoyable as my time living in Hanaten has been if I’m to stick to my plan I need to find my own place soon, a task almost entirely dependent on finding a job. After giving myself the first couple of weeks here off I’ve spent the subsequent month trying to do just this, searching for, applying for, and interviewing for teaching jobs throughout the Kansai area. The search has actually been a lot more enjoyable than expected giving me the chance to meet some really interesting people and gain a deeper understanding of the business of English language education in Japan. I genuinely couldn’t have done it without the help of Eri though who has routinely searched for the locations of the schools and got me there on time for the interviews (how anyone can find some of the schools without a Japanese guide is beyond me!) I’ve been lucky enough to have been offered several positions and in the end I have accepted what seems to be a really good role with an education company called Berlitz. For anyone who has read my previous blog post you will have noted that in the current climate the type of contracts being offered are not always that great so it was a relief to be offered a secure and relatively well paid position. There are some pretty decent added advantages too such as paid holidays, medical insurance and even the use of spa resorts throughout Japan!

Hanaten Shopping Street

Aside from my job search I’ve had a good chance to travel around and I’m slowly beginning to comprehend the vast size of Osaka. The transport systems are quite incredible with multiple lines operated by different companies, different stations and complicated ticketing systems, not to mention the fact that all directions and signage are written almost entirely in Japanese (although my Japanese speaking ability has been improving steadily, written Japanese is unfortunately still beyond me!) The transport is an amazing feature of Osaka life though, it’s always on time, runs until the early hours of the morning, and you can get almost anywhere you want, whenever you want. On the downside it’s expensive and I mean REALLY expensive, I’ll never again complain about the cost of a London Underground Travelcard!

Regardless of the high prices, the complicated travel networks have allowed me to travel regularly and explore the nearby cities of Kyoto, Kobe and Nara and although not held in particularly high esteem by many in the tri-city area of Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto, Nara has been my particular favourite destination. Situated about 40 minutes away by train it is surrounded by beautiful parkland (an aspect that is missing almost entirely in Osaka) that is home to a huge heard of semi-wild deer. The city itself has a beautiful old town centre overlooked by the towering Horyuji Gojunoto temple and is also home to the Todai-ji temple which houses the worlds largest bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana. Thankfully I’m still amazed by each new temple that I come across which is lucky because i've still got plenty more to see as a travel further around Kansai (there are 16,00 in Kyoto prefecture alone!)

The dominating Horyuji Gojunoto Temple in Nara

A street in Nara

As you can see, life in Osaka has been a great experience for me so far and I’m hugely excited about the next few months, Spring is around the corner and with it will come Sakura season (the flowering of the cherry blossoms), it is clearly a special time of year to be in Japan. Shops already have displays of cherry blossoms in their windows and even the beer cans have sakura designs on them in celebration. For me personally it signals the end of the cold winter months and the beginning of the warmer months bringing with them a fresh start in my new country. I can’t wait to start teaching and enjoying summer in Osaka.

Happy White Day!

That’s right, today is White Day, apparently not a day for celebrating the positive influence of White people in Asia, but instead a day for the boys of Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan to give girls chocolates (providing of course said girls gave said boys something decent on Valentine’s day). 

Here is a picture of a monkey with a sign promoting White Day. Something about it says politically incorrect to me.

The Myth of the ¥250,000 Wage.

Japan is an expensive country, everyone knows that, but regardless of this knowledge thousands of foreigners continue to flock here seeking the high wages promised by a job that seemingly requires just one skill; the ability to speak English. After a month spent in Japan as one of these ‘high wage hunters’ I have come to realise that the wages promised are not quite as high as I had previously imagined. As increasing numbers arrive, finding a job that offers anything near to the much discussed ‘average wage’ of 250,000 Yen per month (P.M) is becoming more and more difficult.

Having trodden the familiar path of internet based research before coming to Japan I was left pretty confused over exactly what to expect in terms of a remuneration package should I land a job. The forums I visited for example, were filled with discussions on the difficulties of surviving on a newly employed teachers wage, but what exactly was this wage? Throughout the pages of these forums, along with the websites of the numerous dispatch companies offering work in Japan, a familiar figure kept popping up as the ‘average wage’ for new teachers in Japan; 250,000 Yen P.M.  As a naïve outsider I failed to see how being paid this kind of money could lead to the financial hardships I was reading about, indeed at the current www.xe.com exchange rate 250,000 Yen equates to £1,942.86 or $3,075.04, that’s £23,314.04/$36,900.48 per year, hardly a poverty inducing wage wherever your living.

So where exactly has the 250,000 Yen figure come from? After five weeks of job searching in Osaka I have found plenty of companies that offer much less than this, but just one that offers more to their new teachers (and this was with the catch that all applicants must have a teaching related degree). If life is hard for those being paid 250,000 Yen P.M it must be a whole lot harder for those being paid less – a number which by my estimates accounts for a significant proportion of new teachers.

Thanks to a fairly long, and thankfully productive job search, I have had a good opportunity to gain an understanding of the different types of schools that exist and the type of contracts and remuneration packages currently being offered. From the big corporation eikaiwa’s to the small independent international schools, what has struck me most has been the uncertainty attached to teaching jobs in Japan. The 12 month, secure contracts, with guaranteed hours and wages that I had let myself believe were the norm are in fact near enough non-existent, instead there are a number of companies offering flexible, short term contracts with no guarantees of either hours,  nor wages.

The package offered by Jibun Mirai (part of the new NOVA brand) provides a good example of this type of contract. They offer 6 and 12 month (part time/full time) contracts that range from 12 lessons a week to 40 lessons per week. But there is a catch; while the contract may state you should expect to work, for example, 40 lessons a week, the employer has no obligation to guarantee that number of lessons week by week. One week you might get 40 lessons, the next you could have fourteen. Your subsequent monthly wage is based entirely on lessons worked, not on how many you are contracted to work, if the school only has enough students to teach 80 lessons a month you only get paid for those 80 lessons. Based on the per lesson rates being paid today this can represent a serious problem for teachers.

The pay structure at Jibun Mirai leaves it all but impossible for teachers to take home anything like 250,000 Yen P.M even if you do teach 40 lessons per week. Rather than having a set per lesson wage, teachers are paid a ‘performance related’ wage that starts with a base rate of 800 Yen per hour. With the added ‘assignment allowance’ and ‘regularity allowance’ the figure rises to an almost guaranteed 1,150 Yen per hour, hardly the type of money us ‘high wage hunters’ were expecting. To get up to anything like a decent wage teachers must average between 3 and 5 students per lesson, and there are no guarantees of achieving anything like this figure, especially during the quiet months.

I personally have no experience of working on one of these contracts and I am not in a position to claim that all schools will continually offer fewer lessons than a contract suggests. The thing that worries me is the near complete uncertainty facing those individuals starting a new career in Japan, often thousands of miles away from home. In many cases this uncertainty is compounded by a lack of any sort of employment benefits. Although several schools do still provide national holidays off for their staff (Berlitz and Epion for example), many more insist on staff working them. If you take into consideration that it is rare for foreign staff to earn any holiday in their first six months of service, the reality of the current situation is that prospective teachers are increasingly expected to enter into a contract that has no guarantees of regular lessons or wages, and then work for a minimum of 26 consecutive weeks without holiday.

From what I have seen in my job search the type of contract being offered by Jibun Mirai is thankfully not yet the norm. That being said though, there is evidence of a very real shift towards this type of model. This year for example Epion has stopped offering full time contracts to new staff for the first time with new teachers expected to earn a living wage through extra lessons paid at a per-lesson rate, again with no guarantees. The situation for new teachers is undoubtedly changing, the glory days of teaching English in Japan are over. For those prospective teachers who look hard enough there are, however, still very good first contracts to be earnt. This wont last for long though, beware the contract with no guarantees, it will doubtless be a lot more common this time next year.

Botan Nabe

Although still a relatively new arrival in Japan I’m in the privileged position of living with my Japanese girlfriend, as a result I get to try things that other new arrivals may not get the chance to do. A good example of this was a recent trip into the mountains organised by my girlfriend’s grandmother to experience Botan Nabe.

Botan Nabe, though rare in the more populous regions of Japan, is a well-known dish throughout the mountain regions that surround Osaka and Kyoto. In its simplest terms Botan Nabe can be described as a soup or stew comprising delicious wild boar along with mountain vegetables. The meat itself – dark in colour and rich in flavour – is cut thinly, in much the same way as ham, before being arranged on a plate in the shape of the petals of the peony flower, known in Japan as the Botan flower, hence the name Botan Nabe (Nabe meaning pot).

Though more and more places now offer the dish, particularly within Kansai, like the majority of Japanese cuisine there is a long tradition attached to the dish and the best examples are to be found at the places that have been producing it the longest. One such establishment is Iwaya (link in Japanese) located on the outskirts of Hyogo in an area called Tamba-Sasayama. This family run business has been producing Botan Nabe to great acclaim for more than 40 years, demonstrating that a combination of home grown, award winning rice and vegetables, together with excellent quality boar, can lead to continued success.

The restaurant is a thatched wooden structure that acts as a portal to a bygone era. With room to hold about 50 people, reservations are essential even on a weekday afternoon. The ‘tables’ comprise a small coal fire surrounded with cushions, with a huge steel pot full of hot soup suspended from the ceiling hanging over the fire. Each table is provided with an immaculately presented plate of meat along with a large bowl of mountain potatoes, Chinese cabbage, spring onions, mushrooms, tofu, and home-made konnyaku. Diners are then invited to place the items into the soup thus creating the stew.

On a cold winters day there really is nothing more warming, or filling! The soup is delicious and the rich flavours of the boar are complemented perfectly with the blander flavours of the vegetables and tofu. Each table is also provided with a small bottle of Japanese spices that give an almost citrus flavour to the stew, its perfect.

Just as warming as the stew itself is the sake on offer, which it soon becomes clear plays an equally important role to the boar. Served warm, in a small pottery jug, it completes the dining experience. Slightly less enjoyable, however, is Doburoku, a completely different type of sake that is served cold and lumpy. I’m told it is a local delicacy, though I’m not so sure!

For those left with any room in their stomachs after finishing all the meat and vegetables, a bowl of rice and an egg are brought out. The egg is poached in the remaining soup and served with the rice to complete the feast. And that is exactly what this meal is, a feast.

It is well known that Japan does food well, indeed Osaka is a foodies dream with something to suit quite literally every taste. What the city doesn't have though is the tranquillity of the countryside, indeed regardless of how good a restaurants food is, there are times when what one wishes for most is some peace and quiet. So for those who've had enough of the hustle and bustle of the city, yet still want to experience the finest food available it's comforting to know that somewhere like Iwaya exists. It might be a bit expensive, and it may be difficult to get to, but rest assured, it's completely worth it.

From Osaka, use the Fykuchiyama line (JR) to Sasayamaguchi (1110 JPY). Those with reservations can make use of the restaurant bus service that will take you the short distance up the mountain to the restaurant.

Botan Nabe must be booked in advance for a minimum of two people (5250 JPY each)

Open: October – March