Japan sure is a thing

Let us get the boring stuff out of the way before I start telling you about my glorious white-person-in-JAPAN stories. Firstly, I will not be using real names for the majority of this blog. I do not want to call the wrath of my bosses down on me if they for whatever reason think I'm being too open about things... secondly, I am not too worried about correcting typos or grammar in here. Who cares. I have my professional correct grammar life, and my home life where I type like a 7 year old. I actually had some more notes to jot down here, but who cares, I want to get to the good stuff. Oh yeah, I should also mention that the title of my blog comes from the area of town I live in, which is Happiness Kagami.... I will definitely go over that gem of a name later. I recently came to Japan as an ALT teacher. For those who don't know, it's basically an assistant English teacher for foreign students. It's actually a pretty nice deal, as they really hook you up with nice things, and since teaching English is a breeze (at least for me, since I was a teacher years before I came here). It's a very fun and rewarding job, but I wont borE you with the same speech everyone else gives a boy being an ALT. Now I know you all want to here some funny japanese stories, or about how pretty the cherry blossoms are, or maybe about why there is so much of that anime about a superhero loaf of bread around my town, but I've had a certain subject on my mind recently, and I really want to share this before anything else. -I apparently live in a haunted apartment complex. Happiness Kagami always struck me as a weird name, but I just thought it was some attempt at being cute or kawaii or something. Now I'm just going to guess here, but I think I know where this name came from. Like I said, I've been teaching a few classes now. The first time I teach each class, I have an intro where I allow students to ask me anything they want, so they can get to know me. A question that comes up often (and isn't "do you have a girlfriend", or weirdly enough, "how tall are you", is "where do you live". I simply reply that I live in Happiness Kagami. No big deal, right? Supposedly it is though, because it always got a reaction. Sometimes erupting in lots of chatter. At first I thought they just thought the name was funny, but then it kept getting more alarming as I told more students. I asked my co-teacher (the main teacher of the classroom) about why this was so funny. They first told me that it was just because it was very close nearby. I didn't see what was funny about that, and just accounted it to kids being weird. It kept happening though, and of course I doubted that it was so strange since it was right up the hill. This stuck in my mind for a while, until I had my first board of education meeting. We all chatted about stuff and went over things and for some reason planned a picnic day all the way into July, but one interesting subject came up amongst all that. We had a JET teacher visiting there (JET is one of the most well-known ALT programs in the world), and he found out we lived in Happiness. He had this "Yep I know what's up" look on his face, and told us what we all were dying to know. Apparently the complex is haunted, and it's an urban legend that a young girl jumped out of her balcony and committed suicide. I'm not really one to believe in this kind of stuff, and even if it were true, why would a ghost kid want to hurt anyone, but hey, my apartment complex is part of the town's urban myths. I guess my students knew, and thought it was enthrall itg that a foreigner now lived in a haunted house. I did hear a bunch of moaning next door though, but I think it was a man crying after his wife yelled at him. Oh yeah, japanese women are kind of scary when they yell. I hope I don't get hem mad.