Do The Hustle

The day before the graduation ceremony, a practice was to be held to basically drill the kids on the proper way to stand up, bow, and sit down. And then yell at them for not standing up quickly enough or doing too short of a bow. Gotta love Japan.
Before the torture started, I was hanging out outside of the gym when a group of sannensei boys came up to me and took me off aside from everyone else. In my entire history of having worked with Japanese kids, if a group of Japanese boys makes it a point to lead you aside, no good is going to come from that. And this proved to be no exception.
Boy 1: Hey, so, what were you doing on Saturday night around 8PM?
Me: Saturday night … around 8 you say?
Boy 2: Yep. It was right about then.
Me: *thinks about it* (Crap, they must have seen. Might as well be honest) I went on a dinner date with a girl.
Boy 1: Dinner date, huh? And what about afterwards?
Me: What about afterwards?
Boy 1: What’d you do after dinner?
Me: (definitely can’t be honest about that) I shook her hand like a gentleman and we said our goodbyes.
Boy 2: A handshake? A handshake? Yeah right.
Boy 1: You sure you didn’t do The Hustle?
And here, he makes the same pelvis-thrusting motion that the Waist-Shake boys did many moons ago. It’s worth noting that the two groups of boys are in no way connected though.
Me: No, I didn’t do any Hustling.
Boy 1: You sure about that?
He continues to do the pelvis thrusts (Elvis would be proud), and some other boys joined him. As this was happening, the home economics teacher, an older lady, comes walking up behind us. She has no reaction whatsoever, merely just sidesteps out of the way of the group of 15-year old boys who are thrusting away right before their graduation ceremony practice*. What I really love about Japanese people is how they just don’t blatantly give a fuck about anything that’s going on around them. “Boys doing pelvic thrusts towards their foreign teacher? Oh hey look, that old lady just spontaneously caught on fire. Oh wow, that elephant is going to eat that baby like a soft-serve cone. Well, none of MY business, nosiree!” The only exception to this is if you happen to be different in their general direction, at which point you must be stared at until countered with a Gaijin Optic Blast.
*Sometimes, the pelvis-thrusting motion isn’t always just a gesture for sex. Sometimes it seems to be for “guts!” or “fight!” or something. So sometimes, you’ll get a 12-year old Japanese girl telling you she’ll do her best and then thrusting her pelvis out at you. That’s just how it is here. However, this time with these boys it was obviously a sexual thing – even a blind, deaf, mute hobbit with a crack addiction would have been able to tell the difference.

Anyway.
Boy 1: You sure you didn’t go to a hotel? (He’s making reference to a Love Hotel)
Me: I didn’t go to any hotels.
Boy 2: Why not?
Me: They’re expensive.
Boy 3: But, so long as it’s before 11PM you can go for a “rest” which only costs about 3000 yen.
Me: Now why the fuck do you know this?
Boy 3: I saw a sign once.
Boy 2: That must have been some sign.
Love Hotels – giving your junior high school kids a safe place to fuck because if you didn’t see it, clearly it didn’t happen. Ah, sweet, blessed ignorance.
Moving on.
Boy 2: So anyway, when is your next date?
Me: Um, Friday.
Boy 2: Ah, Friday! Where?
Me: Ok, I’m certainly not telling you that. I get the feeling I’d have some unwanted guests.
Boy 1: Hey, it’s okay. You’d never see us.
Boy 2: We’d just be in the bushes taking pictures.
Boy 1: I’d have my video camera.
Boy 2: Hey, great idea! Then we can sell it as a porn!
Boy 1: Yeah! Oh, but I don’t know how to do the mosaic.
Boy 2: Oh, well, then, we’ll just sell it as No Mosaic! Even better!
The boys here are referring to the fact that all Japanese porn is censored by law. Yes, Japanese porn is censored. Which is about as pointless as a car with no tires, or Paris Hilton with no … um … well, just Paris Hilton. Amazingly enough though, when it comes to how Goddamned awful Japanese porn is, the censor is the least of your worries actually.
Me: Ok, now you guys have really lost me.
Boy 1: Don’t worry, we’ll give you a cut of the profits of course.
Boy 2: Yeah, I think it’ll sell.
Boy 1: Yeah, I saw this one once, Az, you’re an “ALT” right? Well, this was “ELT”. “ELT With Female Student, dot dot dot” You know what happens next.
Boy 2: You can do that!
Me: Absolutely. Not.
Boy 1: *pointing to some of the sannensei girls nearby* You can take one of them to a hotel and Do The Hustle.
If there’s one thing (Ha! One) I still don’t understand about this country in my almost three years here, it’s the almost eager willingness Japanese people have to offer up one of their women to the nearest Gaijin. “Here ya go! We’re not using her, so please be our guest! Very limited mileage!” And, apparently, watch porns of said Gaijin ramming their women. I just found myself thankful that these students didn’t recommend to me any porns where some old guy takes it up the ass from a girl with a strap-on.
If there was ever a “I need to go curl myself up in a corner and softly cry myself to sleep” moment, I think I found it. Excuse me, this may take awhile. How could this happen to me?