Free Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries by Tim Anderson Page B

angle of his greatness. As I make my way to the right side, I see a little entryway where you can go inside for a mere twenty yen. There’s no saying no to an offer like that, so I pay my twenty yen, lower my head, and cross the threshold. As soon as I alight, on the first step there in the darkness, I experience an emotional spasm, like when you realize your boyfriend’s birthday was yesterday and you’d completely forgotten. I realize that not only have I found the Buddha with the help of the good Lonely Planet people, but I now stand inside him. I am in the Buddha’s belly. My God, I think, I should be having a real existential experience right now, shouldn’t I? If only I were Buddhist. Were I Catholic and standing at the foot of the giant Jesus in Rio de Janeiro, I’d surely be weeping, crossing myself, and feeling really guilty about what I’d gotten up to at the bar the previous evening. Alas, I haven’t found my particular religious path yet, so my reaction to stone embodiments of the divine is aesthetic and wholly secular. Contemplating the existence of God while gazing at a religious sculpture never leaves me with questions answered, convictions affirmed, or fears assuaged. I may leave wanting to be a better human, but I’m at a loss as to how I go about it.
    I will say this, though. Walking around the Great Buddha so many times, examining every curve and swoop of his robe, staring fixedly at the way his hands perfectly meet each other as they lay in his lap, makes me feel even more asymmetrical than usual. Thanks a lot, Buddha.
    Though I don’t have a spiritual awakening, we do share a moment, and my hangover feels tons better. Also, I swear, as I exit out around the right side and emerge back around the front, I look up to his mysteriously guarded eyes and they meet mine as he murmurs, “Big enough?”
    “Yes,” I reply, clasping my hands together in a bid for symmetry. “Big enough.”

# of times since arrival I’ve said
    “thank you”: 5,423
    “I’m so sorry”: 5,424
    “It’s a shame about that baby”: 2
     

    In which our hero’s new roommate becomes an international metaphor for something god-awful.
     
    People have all sorts of reasons for leaving their home country to live in a completely foreign land where they stick out like sore thumbs. Some are good reasons (personal fulfillment, sobering up, wanderlust, cultural curiosity), and some are questionable (avoiding the law, drug smuggling, sex tourism). MOBA, one of the most popular language schools in Japan, doesn’t care what the reason is, as long as you can pretend to know how to speak English.
    I’ve had my doubts about MOBA’s hiring practices from the very beginning, and not just due to the fact that my roommate Sean only has a high school education, has never met a double negative he didn’t like, and had no problem getting a job as an instructor. I’ve also noticed a tenuous command of the English language on the part of a few of my coworkers who can barely string a sentence together correctly without breaking into a cold sweat. Like Stanley from New Zealand, who brings a briefcase the size of a tuba case to work and says things like, “Yeah, but he didn’t play like do that right down the middle without your mum crickety bum licker.” Or Pete from Pennsylvania, whom I recently overheard in a class explaining what the word broke means like this:
    “You know if you have something, like a dish or a glass, and you drop it on the floor? Broke is what it becomes. For example, ‘My watch is not working. I think it is broke.’”
    As an English teacher, and a kind of anal retentive one, when overhearing such egregious misteachings of the language in an adjacent classroom (we can hear everything through the thin walls), I often wish I could leave my class, jump into a phone booth on the street below, squeeze into my spandex, grab my magic Declension Dildo, and quickly emerge as some sort of costumed English language