The Giant Encyclopedia of Ultraman Monsters: Monsters Charge!

In Praise of Laver

I came back from the Lunar New Year holiday to find a large box on my desk. It was big and yet very light. "What could be inside?" I wondered, but not out loud because talking to yourself is usually not a good idea. I carried it home on the bus, opened it up, and found:

Lots and lots of dried seaweed, or what is commonly called laver. No, I had never heard this word before coming to Asia, either. I always just called it nori, which is the Japanese. In Korean it's kim, as in "kimbap," or seaweed rice. See how that works?

Anyway, what would I ever need this much seaweed for? Don't get me wrong, I like seaweed. I've eaten it many times with sushi and even occasionally on spaghetti in Japan. But an entire box? Seems a little excessive.

Koreans eat laver in more ways than the Japanese do, it seems. Koreans eat it with rice, using their chopsticks to fold the seaweed sheet over some rice. They'll even eat it as a snack with alcohol, as is. All are good. But again, how am I ever going to consume all of this seaweed?

How indeed. These are, of course, the words of someone who has not yet consumed this particular brand of seaweed. Since opening a pack and eating the contents with rice, I have realized just how wonderful seaweed can be. I am now orienting my meals around the seaweed, it's so good.

I'd say come on over and have some with me, but I don't think I have enough for two. Sorry.

The Snake Cult of Beppu

Just a castle?

It was two years ago that I first heard rumor of a castle in Beppu. I was preparing to leave Oita after a year of studying Japanese there. Beppu, the next town up the line, was famous for its hot springs but it apparently also had a castle. Odd this, as it was never a castle town. Had some millionaire decided to erect his own castle and infuse it with his own, bizarre personality? Alas, I was too busy with preparations for leaving to find out.

Fate (and some time off from work) brought me back to Oita for a week, and I was determined this time to find that elusive castle. Whether historical recreation or vanity project, I just had to see it. Like Americans and their love for roadside attractions, the Japanese are not above building shrines or landmarks that bare little to no resemblance to accepted reality.

"Does Beppu have a castle?" I asked the woman behind the counter at the little tourist office in front of Beppu Station.

"Well, not a real one," she answered, a hint of disapproval in her voice.

"That's the one!"

With map in hand, I boarded a bus bound for Kifunejo, something like High-class Boat Castle. What would I find, I wondered. What lay before me? There was no way I could have prepared myself for what was to come.

I got off the bus at the stop marked on the map and started up the steep hill towards the castle. The bus stop was named for the castle, and there were plenty of signs along the way. This was a bigger deal than I thought. Strange that I hadn't heard of it long ago. Why the secrecy, I wondered.

I reached the top of the hill, huffing and puffing, and paused to take a look at the castle. Although small, with only three stories, it was indeed a normal-looking castle. Someone had obviously spent a lot of money to erect this here. Still wondering why, I paid my 300-yen entrance fee (around $3.00) and headed for the entrance.

I had paused there momentarily to catch my breath, as I was still wheezing from the climb, when a man started beckoning me inside. I tried to tell him in Japanese to wait a minute but he kept insisting. Strange to be so insistent, I thought. I took off my shoes at the entrance, not unheard of for original castles, and followed him inside.

Most castle interiors follow one of two plans: original castles are left as-is. They are largely empty inside, being built to withstand sieges and not for everyday living. Recreations usually have museums inside. You follow the museum plan up and up, eventually reaching the top. This was different. The entire first floor looked like the lobby of a mountain lodge, complete with exposed wooden beams, furniture like couches and chairs, and even European-style paintings hanging on the walls. One entire wall was taken up by an open stage, on which was placed a shrine. This was not your typical castle.

Just like home.

Take it to the stage.

The man made a beeline for a small door directly across the open room from the shrine stage. He opened the door, which was only a few feet high, and then started to descend a ladder into a kind of pit. I hope he doesn't expect me to follow him, I thought, feeling a little weirded out by all that was happening.

Is that an albino snake or are you just happy to see me?

And then he emerged with a snake. A large, white snake. It was some kind of albino python. Still sitting inside the little door, he placed it on the ground and let it slither around. He was talking non-stop in Japanese and I only caught the occasional, "This is a snake. Mr. Snake. You know snakes?" I smiled gamely and nodded.

"Touch it!" he demanded. I hesitated and he said it again. I reached out my hand to lightly touch the pinkish-white scales. "Touch it!" he said, even more loudly, and brought his hand down on mine, pressing my hand onto the hard, muscular snake. Alarm bells started going off in my head and I pulled back. This was decidedly odd and I really wanted to get away from this snake-obsessed man, so I backed up, a smile frozen to my face. He must have seen the panic in my eyes because he said something about taking pictures inside the castle being OK and then disappeared back into the snake pit.

The upstairs shrine.

I rushed up the stairs, happy to be free from the snake man. On the top floor was another shrine, this one with what looked like two massive, origami snakes draped over either end of a narrow table. There was a picture of an older lady holding an albino snake on a nearby shelf, the date marked 1990. They must really like snakes here, I thought. I walked around on the outside of the top level, a little concerned at how rickety the construction was, and then went back down to the first floor, ready to leave.

As I came down the stairs, I heard the voice of the snake man, praying. There, sitting on the ground in front of the snake pit, were four people, all in their 20s or early 30s. They were kneeling with their eyes tightly closed, their hands clasped in prayer. The snake slithered disinterestedly around their legs. I couldn't believe it—they were praying to the snake. I dared to get a little closer, hoping to maybe take a picture, and an old lady sitting to one side noticed me and motioned me to join them.

There are few things in this life I wanted less than to join them. I was overcome by the strangeness of it all and went into flight mode, my only desire to get away from this scene and outside. I rushed out, the sound of the man's intoning voice retreating behind me. At last, I was outside, the wind of freedom on my face. I kept going a good 30 feet away from the castle before I stopped and turned around.

Yes, that's a dead snake under the glass.

And that's when I noticed it. The shrine that was right at the entrance to the castle was no ordinary shrine. Sitting inside was a large glass case. And inside the large glass case was a very big, very white dead snake. My body shuddered involuntarily and I turned away from the castle, wanting only to get back on the bus and away from the insanity.

Riding the bus back down the hill, surrounded by the comforting sight of people going about their daily routines, it occurred to me that I may have witnessed a fertility rite. Certainly the color and shape of the snake suggested the male member. And I couldn't say for sure—I was too flabbergasted at the time to notice—but it may have been two couples praying over the snake.

Perhaps the snake man assumed I had come there not as a fan of Japanese castles but as a man wanting to increase his virility. I hadn't touched the snake with enough passion, so he pressed my hand down even more. I wouldn't say it was virility coursing through me at that moment, not unless virility feels a lot like panic.

Japan has quite a few "fringe" religions that combine elements of Shinto, Buddhism and whatever else seems appropriate, like extreme cleanliness or fear of lasers. With the odd hodgepodge of items in that castle, I wouldn't be surprised if this weren't some kind of cult. The fact that the castle was attached to a house is pretty odd. I guess the recruits need a place to sleep in-between praying to the pink behemoth.

The funny thing is, not a few hours after touching Mr. Snake I had a very unexpected romantic encounter. Coincidence? Only the Snake Cult of Beppu knows for sure.

No Phone For You

The Fist of English.

We're currently between semesters at my school. The Korean school year is kind of odd. There's almost 4 months of classes in the fall and winter, and then between New Year and March 1 the students are at school but there aren't really classes, per se. They're just there. This happens again in the summer. I suppose studying is a full-time job.

Right now I'm teaching some of the incoming high school freshmen. They're all brand new to the school, having not gone to our middle school. This is immediately apparent as their behavior is—how shall I put it?—a little lacking. They're hilarious and keep me laughing from bell to bell but they don't always exhibit model behavior. This is especially apparent when it comes to cell phones. I had never seen a phone in one of our middle school classes until these new students arrived. They just can't keep them in their pockets.

It's all the usual distractions: text messages, Internet, games. Plus they have Japanese comics downloaded onto their phones. The other day I saw a kid looking at his lap so I sauntered over and caught him with his phone. "Don't play games in class," I told him, sternly. "No game! No game!" he protested. "Reading comics."

All of the teachers carry around "teaching sticks," big honking sticks that they swat the kids with when they get out of line. The swatting ranges from playful to possibly illegal. Corporal punishment is on its way out in the school system but for teachers who grew up with it, and students who know only one kind of discipline, it's slow to die. I disagree with hitting kids, and it's just not my style to carry around a bat, so instead I bought a big novelty fist that squeaks when you bop something with it. It's harmless and funny but it presents a visual that says, "I'm a person of authority." It's also embarrassing to a student who gets a squeaky bop in class. Lately there's been a lot of phone-related bopping.

I don't know if these new students are being so cavalier because it's technically between semesters, or if their previous schools were really permissive, but this is just annoying. I have warned them about phones in class. I have bopped heads. I have even confiscated phones. But they're addicted, it seems.

"I'm nice," I told them. "But be careful when you get upstairs and take real high school classes. Those teachers aren't nice." And it's true. They will not suffer phones in class. These kids are in for a rude awakening in a few weeks.

And The DJ

I recently posted a YouTube clip of "Panic," a song by the 80s British band The Smiths, to my Facebook page along with the confession that when I was young I thought the lyrics went, "And the DJ, and the DJ." A silly thing to think, for the song is famous—even infamous—for advocating listeners to "hang the DJ." My confession was met with incredulity, a little scorn, and astonishment, this last one from my high school girlfriend, with whom I shared a particular passion for this band.

"But I was only 14," I responded defensively. And the song might be famous now for that lyric—indeed, entire articles have been written about it—but when I was listening to The Smiths or any other music in my teens, it was in a void, with no markers to guide me or signposts to show me the way. I had only my exploding interest in unusual music and my own fervent imagination to guide me. In the UK, The Smiths were massively popular, their every release a cause for celebration. But in Foster City, a small suburb outside San Francisco, they were known only by a few, and loved by even fewer.

Nowadays, young people have the Internet to turn to for information. Indeed, anything you could ever want to know about anyone, at any time, is there. But in my youth, we had to rely on books and magazines purchased in the faraway Big City, or on word of mouth from similarly minded friends. So it's no surprise that I should mistake that lyric, or any other, because lyrics to our favorite songs were not easily obtained. In those days, there was less certainty but certainly more mystery.

Spurned on by its mystery, music was my everything. I remember being so besotted with a certain song, I constructed an entire lesson plan in my head for my English teacher to use, one involving us choosing the lyrics from a piece of music to offer as a modern equivalent of poetry, just so I could tell someone, anyone, how much it touched me. And I would listen to music on my cassette Walkman on the bus every day, my favorite songs soundtracking my young and confusing life.

But I never even dared try to listen to music in class.

In my day all we had in our pockets was our house key (if we hadn't forgotten it somewhere) and maybe a crumpled-up note from our best friend. Today's Korean young are overwhelmed with privilege. They have cell phones and MP3 players, electronic dictionaries and mini-TVs, often all one and the same. And they all seem to think they should be allowed to access any of them at any time in class, the teacher be damned. For all of the much-lauded Korean respect for teachers and the system of discipline in place, these students get away with some things that would have gotten us sent to the principal's office back in the day: things like drawing on desks, constantly getting up and walking around, and listening to music in class.

They think they're being sneaky. They look around to make sure no one is watching and then they slide their ear buds in. Maybe they'll pull up a hood or rearrange their hair to cover their ears. And then they spend a considerable amount of time staring at their laps and moving their fingers. Or maybe they'll make a small consent to authority and only block up one ear. But no matter how you look at, they've tuned the teacher out.

As a first-time teacher, I really have no idea what's going on. I'm just trying to keep it all together while creating lesson plans from scratch, trying to manage the time so we get through everything in the lesson, and trying to keep the class from devolving into an indoor riot. So when I see students do things like plug into their MP3 players, it drives me crazy. I'm doing my best to reach them. They don't have to like it but they do have to listen. Am I really so boring that the first chance they get they want to tune me out?

Throughout all of this, I have been thinking of my students as these incredibly young people. They are kids, of course, and range in Korean age (that being one or two more years than everywhere else) from 13 to 20. My first-year middle school kids are as child-like as you can get. They love professional wrestling and candy, and collapse on the floor in laughter when someone farts. My senior high school students are men in almost every sense of the word bar the legal. Very few are shorter than I am. But they're still kids compared to me.

But what about me when I was in middle school or high school? Was I ever like this? Did I run to the school store between classes for candy, or horse around with friends in class, or willfully ignore the teacher to look at something a friend had brought to school? Did I have bad days and resent the teachers, even the ones I liked? Did I sometimes wish I could be anywhere but that class, my hormones driving my emotions into the red? Did I even cut class one time, just once, because a cute, older girl asked me to cut with her?

Of course I did, and I was a good student. I was a good kid.

But I have also always been me. It's hard to separate the now me from the then me, the 38-year-old me from the 14-year-old me who spent hours listening to music from England and reading weird books bought in Haight Street bookstores. My personality is largely unchanged, now as then. I am still overly sensitive, prone to solitude and intensely fond of music. But I am also patient, weathered and mellow, things that I have arrived at only after taking the trip that has been my life.

I try my best to be a good teacher. While other native teachers just play games, or try to get by on the most minimal of lesson planning, I like to think I go the extra mile. I left a previous job as a magazine editor to go back to school so that I could teach English in Asia. As fun as writing was, it just wasn't rewarding enough. I wanted a job where I was giving back to the world in some way, contributing to the better good. I imagined myself answering students' questions, being there for them when they had hard questions, and enjoying the camaraderie between student and teacher. All of my romantic fantasies featured angelic, smiling students, with not one challenging delinquent among them.

However. Life is not a dream, despite what some poets might have you believe. Reality is a messy thing. And the reality of teaching is even messier.

There's a tendency when teaching to focus on the bad students. A class is made up of many different kinds of people. There's the good students, who sit in the front and always pay attention. After class they offer to carry my laptop or buy me juice, and tell me how much they like my class. There are the class clowns, who like to participate whether or not they have any idea what the answer is, just as long as they can say it loudly. There are the precocious students who know English but don't want to do it my way, who challenge what I say at every step. Mostly they drive me crazy but I also secretly love them because they're exercising critical thinking skills, however crudely. And there are the students who just don't care, for whatever reason. Maybe they're math whizzes but they stink at English, so they sleep or read or talk. It is a room of individuals, each thinking differently, with different goals and ambitions.

Because we expend so much energy on dealing with the problem kids, it's easy to generalize the whole class based on them: to see the class as a unit. For example, my 1-4 class is terrible. Their English ability is low so they don't care, and often resort to mimicking me. A downside of this is that I find myself not trying as hard with this class. They don't care so why should I? I dumb-down their lessons and often entertain the idea of abandoning lessons altogether in favor of games with minimal English. But a class is not a discreet unit. And when I fall into thinking of it as such I have effectively abandoned the good students in that problem class.

I have also abandoned the bad students. Like those students who just want to listen to music, these "bad students" that drive me so crazy are people, just like me. But they are not patient and weathered and mellow. They are emotional and annoyed and occasionally angry. I saw one boy give a co-teacher an intense look of hatred and then storm out of class. I couldn't believe it. But they are also sometimes funny and mischievous and, I believe, really want to be respected.

There's one student in my 1-4 class who has been trouble since the beginning. This is, however, partly my fault. He is the "king" of class, I have been told by the other students, and will always raise his hand even when he doesn't know the answer. On one of the first days, I rebuked his enthusiasm with a dismissive, "Not you." What I should have said, of course, was, "Let's give someone else a chance." But I didn't. And what resulted was a power struggle that waged for months.

I still don't understand his motivations. For the most part we are friends now. I encourage his enthusiasm and depend on him to keep the class in line, for the other students seem to respect his authority. But he also pushes mine on occasion.

"Hello, Adam," he said to me in the hall one day.

"Adam Teacher," I corrected, hoping to be thought of in the same way as the Korean teachers, whose names are always appended with sangseongnim (which can mean either "sir" or "teacher," it seems).

"Adam Student," he retorted, a mischievous smile on his face.

Of course he was joking but he was closer to the mark than he may have realized. Although I was hired to be a teacher to these boys, in many ways I am their student. And not just because I am a first-time teacher going through what is effectively on-the-job training. It's more than that. They're teaching me about life. And, strangely enough, about death.

I'm almost 40. I have never been married. I don't have any children. Until recently, I never even thought about my own mortality. The fact that the human race might continue after my death had never really occurred to me. Call it profound selfishness or just an unwillingness to look beyond my own ego. I suppose most people realize this when they have progeny; staring into the face of their own flesh and blood, they know that this miniature version of themselves, different yet somehow the same, will carry on living after they're gone.

Not me. I have no spawn, no Mini Me. Until coming to Korea, I had very little contact with young people at all. But these kids, these students I see everyday, will still be chugging along, living and laughing and loving long after I'm gone. I'm not so vain to think that their weekly interaction with me with blow their minds enough to make an impression that will last a lifetime, but if even just a few remember one thing I say to them, that will be enough.

When I was 14, there was a substitute teacher who would occasionally teach at our school. His name was Don Gross, and he was the coolest adult I had ever met. He wore Doc Martens boots and Levis jeans, and thrift store sweaters. He had unkempt hair and published books of poetry through City Lights, the same company that published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

He didn't even talk like an adult, at least not like any adult I had ever met. I remember the first time he taught at our school, he was filling in for an absent English teacher. He had to give us a lesson on superfluous commas and so started with a justification for why we should care about such a thing. No teacher had ever bothered to justify English for us before, ever. And yet here he was, trying to convince us why this dry grammar lesson mattered.

"Let's say you've got a good job for an advertising agency," he started, leaning against the big desk at the front of the room. "Things are going really well. You get to fly all around the world first class and write advertising copy. What you write is really well received and you're like a star. You get to hang out with celebrities and famous sports players. It's the good life. But then one day you turn in some copy with a superfluous comma. Your boss fires you, and poof! Gone are the jets and the celebrities and sports stars. Your wife leaves you and you become an alcoholic and end up living on the streets. All because of that one superfluous comma."

He was making it up as he went along, of course. I'm sure he walked into our class that morning not having any idea what he was going to say. It may even have been his first time substitute teaching ever. But the point is that it was not only what he said, but the way in which he said it, that touched me. What he said moved me enough that I remember it to this day. Twenty-five years later I can still recall that off-the-cuff lecture on superfluous commas. And not only that, but I often think of it while I'm writing. I'm actually thinking of it right now, wondering if the commas I'm placing in this piece are really all necessary.

Of course, I'm hoping that I can make an impression on these students somehow. That something I say, some little bon mot about English will stick in the back of their mind and make itself useful sometime in the future, like during an interview for college, or during a job interview. Or even if it's just a smile that they remember, that will be fine.

The 14-year-old me who loved music passionately and didn't always pay attention in class is still here. He stands beside me everyday while I teach. He reminds me not to see the students sitting before me as a unified class, but as individuals. And he reminds me to cut the bad kids some slack, because they're just teenagers trying to make their own way in the world, and they really don't mean it, even if what they say does sometimes hurt. And he tells me to try to see things from their point of view. The dedication and determination of these kids astounds me. They study from morning until night, everyday. No wonder they're tired. No wonder they don't always pay attention, or get mouthy. I would too. I do, actually, and take it out on them sometimes. Only I get paid for it; they get punished for it.

And the 14-year-old me reminds me that it's not me that my students are tuning out when they try to listen to music in class, but music that they're tuning in. I saw a student that I had previously caught listening to music in the hall after class and asked to hear what he was listening to. "Korean hip-hop," he said, by way of excusing the music as not being of my taste. "That's OK, I said. "I'd like to hear it." The music was light and melodic, a world's difference from what I usually think of as hip-hop. "I love hip-hop," he said proudly as I handed the headphones back to him. "It's good," I replied, happy to have made a small connection with him. "It's really good."

This was my entry to a provincial essay contest. I don't think I won.

Korea On Its Own Terms

You'd think I'd be familiar with culture shock by now, having lived overseas before. And I am. I'm familiar enough with that unwelcome house guest to know when it's moved in, but not familiar enough to know how to entice it to leave. But leave it will, and did, so now I can look at the mess it left behind and see what it all means.

I'm declaring myself free of Korean culture shock. For now. If I remember correctly from my year in Japan, culture shock has a nasty habit of dropping by unannounced just when you think you've gotten rid of it for good. Well, next time I'll be prepared.

So what have I learned? I have learned that I have to take Korea on its own terms. Generally when people experience culture shock they're fighting against the fact that their new host country is not like home. But for me, I was upset that Korea was not like Japan. I had adapted to Japan. I knew what to say when, what the cultural peculiarities were, and what the worse days to travel were. Now I was in a new country that looked a lot like Japan (and by rights should have been Japan, if JET had not forsaken me) but everything I knew was wrong. Speaking Japanese here was not only incorrect, it was likely to get me lynched.

Korea and Japan are similar, to an extent. Both have borrowed a lot from their neighbor, China, including bits of culture and elements of the language. Both are also hierarchical societies that stress seniority and deference to authority rather than individual will, and both have strong undercurrents of Confucianism running through them. The Japanese language is even considered to be an offshoot of Korean. But you would never confuse the two countries, just as you would never confuse France and Spain, or Germany and America, even though they share many similarities, both culturally and linguistically.

So I have come to learn. But not only have I learned it, I have accepted it, and doing this, embraced it. I don't want Korea to be Japan any more. I want Korea to be Korea, in all its messy, noisy glory. I am enjoying Korea for what it is. I am enjoying learning the language as well, which is close enough to Japanese that it's not a bear to learn but different enough that it's an ongoing, enjoyable challenge.

I look forward to what Korea has to show me next.

What, 40 Already?!

Here's something unexpected: In Korea, you're already one year old on the day that you're born. They count gestation as life (don't let the right to lifers know) so newborns greet the world with a full year already under their belts. That is, if babies wore belts.

This is a fun fact, isn't it? What's not so fun: I have gone from 38 years old to 39 without the presents and the cake and the party. Even though I'm 38 back home, in Korea I'm almost 40. ALMOST 40. This is very unfair.

But wait, there's more: in Korea, seniority in everything is determined by age. If you're older, you're better. Doesn't matter how much of a knob you are. If you were born before the next guy, you win. Don't like it? Tough titty, that's the way it is.

To keep people from going nuts and getting really nitpicky about it, they let everyone born in the same year be of equal status. This has the added benefit of creating bonding opportunities for strangers. It doesn't matter if you have nothing else in common, if you were born in the same year you're instant best buds. Time to drink.

To make sure everyone born in the same year really understands that they're the same age, your age advances not on your birthday but on January 1. (Some will argue that it happens on the Lunar New Year.) This is all wonderful and fascinating but what it means to me is that on January 1 I will turn 40. Goddamn it!

See, I was born in 1972, making me 38 everywhere except Korea. My birthday is February 1, so everywhere except Korea I will turn 39 on February 1, 2011. But in wonderful, wacky Korea I am already 39 and thus will turn 40 on January 1, a full 13 goddamn months early. This does not please me.

But, I hear you saying, isn't being older a good thing in Korea? Doesn't that make you even more superior? No, it doesn't, because I'm a foreigner and therefore don't get to win at anything. I'm just a 40-year-old foreigner.

At least the kimchi is good.