Tune in Tokio

down for long stretches of time. But it is only in the following weeks that I realize the huge impact that Survivor has made on my life.

The world around me has become my own personal tribal council. I am now fixated on the idea of voting people who are in some way undesirable out of my life. On the train late on a Saturday night, sitting next to a drunken salaryman keeling over into the about-to-throw-up position, I find myself looking around to see who might be encouraged to join in an alliance with me to get him voted off the train.

Or standing in line at the invariably long lunch-hour ATM line at the bank, the machines already occupied by customers engaged in every form of banking transaction possible by machine in Japan-withdrawals, bankbook updates, transfers, deposits, movie tickets, laundry, pap smears, and so forth-all taking up precious time. “The tribe has spoken,” I grumble to myself, gazing at the tiny lady who shows no signs of giving up her position at the machine.

And of course in class, on those days when a student-for example a young female university student named Noriko, eyelashes curled, lip gloss immaculately applied, mobile phone ringing repeatedly-is too scared to speak to me, too embarrassed to speak to her partner, yet too dedicated to say “screw English” and walk out, I relish the idea of being able to just close my eyes, cast a vote in my head, and exterminate the weakest link from the room.

Soon I start to think about the English teachers here at Lane and how the Survivor rules could be applied to us. If for some reason we were forced to vote other teachers out of the school, who would be the ultimate survivor?

“It would totally be me,” my roommate Eric says without a moment’s hesitation. I admire his self-assurance, but I smile at the thought of voting him off at the tribal council just to thwart his plan and take him down a few pegs. To the camera, I’d say, “Eric, you’re a good guy and a great roommate, and I love listening to you and your boyfriend have sex upstairs, but your overconfidence is a real drag.” This all given I haven’t been voted off yet.

“’Twouldn’t be me,” Will from South Africa imagines aloud. “Jdddiengkcmd wowiuet cuirtios oourdke todlsh mwlekeri, and dkeiwpo wojdap wieorot woeikd ih sowheiwo rowierhs.” I’m not sure what reason he’s giving, but I tend to think it has something to do with the fact that no one can ever understand a goddamn word he is saying. Ever. No, it ’twouldn’t.

So who would it be? Definitely not Brodie and his mullet. No reasonable teacher would allow that hairstyle to survive and prosper at this school. And what about everyone’s favorite ex-military man McD? He has the deltoids and abs to survive in the real Survivor, certainly. But that will get you nowhere here. Recently he put a sign on his shelf reading, “THE STUFF ON THIS SHELF IS NOT PUBLIC PROPERTY. HANDS OFF,” which I think somehow alienated the majority of the other teachers. It was completely unnecessary, since none of us want his Listerine, razors, cologne, or collection of muscle tees, and we definitely aren’t interested in pilfering his lesson plans, which we imagine contain multiple-choice exercises like:

Please write the correct choice on the line. If you circle the answer and don’t write it on the line, the answer is wrong. Sorry. I can’t help you if you don’t follow directions. Pay attention next time.

1) McD gave his girl a dozen roses and took her out to Applebee’s ____________________(to celebrate/for celebrating) their one-week anniversary.

2) McD beat up the guys trying to scam on his girl ____________________ (with/by) his bare hands.

I’ll hazard a guess that he and his shelf would be two of the first to go, though the shelf might last longer depending on how badly we needed to shave.

And how about yours truly? How long would I last in this game?

“We’d get voted off at the same time,” Rachel says with absolute certainty. “Everyone would write both our names on that little paper with exclamation marks after them once they got sick of hearing us talk about stupid shit. We don’t have any other role here. We have nothing else to contribute.”

I think back to the last few no-doubt very loud conversations Rachel and I had in the teachers’ room. Let’s see, we covered 1) the screw-ability of Japanese heartthrob Masaya Kato (extreme), 2) the lameness of the sandwich choices at the Daily Yamazaki convenience store (potatoes on white bread is not nearly as good as it sounds), and 3) how Madonna rates as a lyricist (verdict: not great but better than Bjork). Yeah, I’d vote us off, too.

My Survivor obsession begins to subside a bit, and I try and return to some semblance of a normal life-the carefree life I had before that odious videotape-until I’m shaken back into survival mode after a curious twist of fate at our busy conversation school.

PLI and Wyndam, the two companies that until recently co-owned Lane Language School, are constantly at odds with each other, the former being PR-based and the latter concentrated on curriculum development. It is a marriage made in hell. As teachers, we are actually contracted to and paid by Wyndam, but this is all about to change. The two companies are dissolving their partnership, and PLI will take over the entire school. For most of us teachers, this is not good news. Why? The PR people.

The job of the PR people is to bring prospective students into the school, show (sometimes drag) them around, and convince them that really expensive English lessons are just what they need. During their tour of the school, the PR person will joyfully tell them as many lies about the greatness of the school as they can fit into thirty minutes. To a young, homely male college student-“Most guys your age usually find girlfriends here.” To an elderly, blue-haired obaasan-“Do you like my Japanese? I learned it using this school’s method.” (Our school doesn’t teach Japanese.) Lies, lies, lies. And then they come to us and ask us to do a “level check” on the student, hoping we don’t manage to ruin the momentum they’ve got going and scare him or her away with our loud Western speech and pronounced gestures.

The PR people are an enigma, and they wear very strong cologne. They’re kind of like “the TV people” that Carol Ann is so spooked by in Poltergeist: disruptive, creepy to be around (as salespeople usually are), and possessed of evil clown faces. They also never take on the same form twice, and the smile you saw yesterday may turn into something much scarier if you don’t watch yourself. So we’re less than thrilled that they will now be overseeing every aspect of the school, lording it over us with what we can only assume will be a firm hand, a steady grip, and, perhaps, a swimming pool full of dead bodies.

But the real poignant moment comes when we’re told via office memo that as a result of the switchover in ownership, the Ginza school will close and the entire Lane School will become concentrated on the two floors we now occupy in Shinjuku. Which means that some of Lane’s one hundred teachers will be let go.

Upon hearing the news, each of us feels a surge of vulnerability course through our bodies.

“Oh shit, if I lose a job as a freaking English teacher in Japan, I’m going to gouge my eyes out,” Rachel said. And I must say I am right there with her. It’s about as hard to get fired from a teaching job in Japan as it is to be mistaken for a native Japanese. As my former employer so clearly demonstrated, some schools seem to import village idiots from across the English-speaking world to come and try their luck teaching in this fair country. As a result, some poor Japanese folks are probably walking around saying things like “Jerry, he a lazy, good-for-nothing mama’s boy and he deserve what he get. I’m glad I fucked his cousin!” So what does it say about one if one is actually sacked from the easiest job to get in the country?

I shift immediately back into Survivor mode, making a mental list of all of those who are more likely to get the sack than I am. The word on the street is that there are certain teachers who have numerous complaints in their file already: Fran, who is always putting his name and phone number on the board at the beginning of every class and has been heard encouraging a few unimpressionable young girls to use it; Brad, who has offended a few with his chronic sweating problem; and of course Will, whose file allegedly overflows with accounts of students unable to follow anything he said in any of his classes, ever, in his history as an instructor. And this is only what Tami knows. Rachel is bound to know more.

“So Rachel, what’s the story? Who’s gonna get the axe? Give me the lowdown, the 411, the in-fo-ma- shun.”

“Well, I don’t know. I’ve heard a few rumors about Fran, Brad, and Will, but not much else.”

Drat. The one person I thought I could count on to have her finger on the pulse is no more clued-in than I.

Work becomes a little unsteady. It’s kind of a dramatic time, each of us teaching our classes as if in a matter of weeks we will be peddling English lessons door to door. All of a sudden, our lives have turned into Survivor: Tokyo Smackdown. Will we start engaging in sabotage against each other, planting incriminating evidence in each other’s classrooms? Will I walk into a class one day soon and find that my