"Compensating"

Sometimes I forget I am in Japan. I am lulled to sleep every night by the Weakerthans, and the occasional bullet train passing overhead that could easily be mistaken for a distant semi on I-75. Then I wake up and join the morning throngs commuting back into the Japanese reality that my school is on top of a fricking mountain. Not actually a mountain though--more of a hill if you ask any of the locals. Aggravating as it may be, I think they use the word 'hill' fairly loosely though, but for a number of reasons. One, because by comparison, the only legitimate mountain in Japan is Mt. Fuji. And two...actually, that's the only reason, and I'm not going back to amend "a number of reasons" because I've already typed like three lines since then.
Get bent.

Anyway, when I first got here, I thought it mildly impressive that my school was going to be on top of a mountain. I mean: (1) You can see lots of stuff from the tops of mountains. (2) Given the location, and the aforementioned view, mountain real estate must be pretty valuable; thus, our school must be loaded. (3) Mountain tops are also purported "power zones" where one can supposedly derive "soul energy" from aligned forces in unsubstantiated hippy bullshit.
* dir:run/rebuttal.exe *

I have commuted to the top of this "mountain" five or six times a week for three months now, and I now have a legitimate number of reasons as to why I was an idiot for thinking mountains were anything but a giant pain in my now shapely ass.

1. You can see lots of rusty rooftops and drab concrete from Japanese mountain tops. Mountains = phail.

2. Mountain top real estate is actually the cheapest of all Japanese real estate claims, behind even "Kaiten Zushi Back Alley," "Bullet Train Septic Dump," and "The Entire Prefecture of Ibaraki." Why? Because Asian hippies are not a credible source, and nobody wants to climb up a goddamn mountain just for the 'privilege' of going to work. Mountains again for teh phail.

3. I think #2 was such a good reason, you should just read it again.

* dir:end/rebuttal *
Anyway, what started as a simple photograph has turned into a disjointed rant about commuting and mountaineering. So, to get this derailed disaster back on the right track, let's return to the photo shall we?

Here is the side of my building at the top of the aforementioned mountain. Notice the banners hanging from the side. The banner on the right tells about all the wonderful programs (karate, skiing, bowling, swimming, etc.) our school offers, while the banner on the left lists all the famous Japanese universities (University of Hokkaido, U of Kobe, U of Osaka, U of Hiroshima, etc.) that our graduates have gotten into. Without inadvertently launching into another boorish rant on how the Japanese school system judges success on sending applicants to famous universities, and not on quality of its actual ability to educate, I'll just say that the banner on the left is supposed to motivate the incoming students, and shout from the mountaintop soapbox to the entire prefecture of Okayama that we are a good school.


Or that our principal has a small penis.