My students have diarrhea and I know it.

One day, as I was regularly tempting lady luck by asking my students various questions about their weekends, one volunteered a most interesting tidbit: "I had diarrhea yesterday." The mere shock of hearing this 40-some-year-old man admit to me the intimate details of the state of his innards almost gave me an instant case of some serious mud-butt, myself.

"Oh," I said, and risked a quick glance around the room to search for well-masked smirks or silent snickering. Nothing. "Um... how are you feeling today?"

"I feel good today, thank you," he said, and then launched into a perfectly normal tale about about his trip to a shrine with his daughter, wife, and liquidy bowels. "That's lovely," I said, and then thanked him, as I usually do, when a student endeavors to share.

So this guy isn't the most normal guy I've met and, by no strange coincidence, he works for a company that produces the pump that goes inside a toilet. He also regularly does aerobics, which isn't that abnormal, except... it really is. There's a lot of machismo in Japanese society, and he's a few testicles shy of a Chuck Norris.

Though that was the first time, it certainly wasn't the last, and when one of my most advanced students offered up the same in a group class of five women, four out of five of whom are teachers, four our of five of whom are fairly reserved (she among them), I decided to risk embarrassment (for them and for me), and pose the necessary question. I felt my face begin to flush, but I had reached the point of no return, there was no turding back (ha!).

"So I noticed in some of my other classes that students are often willing to share when they have... um... diarrhea. Is that normal in Japan?" She looked confused, as if I had asked an American, "Do students really ride big yellow school buses to school?" (They don't in Japan.) I explained that that sort of thing is generally a private issue, often embarrassing for Americans to talk about. "Oh interesting," she said. "We just think of it as a symptom." Which makes some sense, but I can think of many other symptoms not worth sharing. Then one of the other students said that though we Americans may keep our bathroom happenings to ourselves, they equally shocked by American's frank openness about sex. Touche, except this wasn't so much a cultural difference as it was a personal one.

There's a coffee shop I often visit with some rather entertaining characters, one of whom let me in on this not-so-secret personal detail [bracketed text in Japanese]: "I am shick."

I assumed I knew what he meant, but I decided to play dumb. "I'm sorry?"

"I have... pink aura."

I quickly appreciated my efforts at feigning ignorance. "Pink aura?"

"I am [very perverted]." Those words, of course, I knew. How this guy who can barely communicate in sentences longer than three words came up with "pink aura" I will never know.

"[I'm number one pervert]," he went on. "[No, I'm in the top five. She's number one]," he said, pointing to one of his rather shy co-workers.

"[What?!]"

He then said that he'd lend me a sample of his huge manga (comic) collection, full of perverted stories about who knows what. Actually, *I* know what. A friend of mine and I were browsing through a new book/comic/music/video store (called "The Something Store" in typically poor Japanese English) that opened up last month , and I had to do a double-take as I saw one of the manga titles: "The Rape Man" (title in English, content in Japanese, as are all local manga). The whole aisle was filled with titles like that one. I've been in other bookstores where men have been not only ogling, but also standing in the middle of the store, reading these works unabashedly. Many read them on the train as well, though so far I've only seen your run-of-the-mill manga as opposed to the perverted variety. But you'd think these guys would buy them, take them home and, I don't know, explore some other symptom. And then tell me about it in class.

Anyway, work #2's been a pain lately, but hopefully things will settle down soon. I'll try to catch up on emails and post pictures this week.