Wednesday, April 06, 2005

The pen is mightier than the poisoned dog treats

I am constantly amazed at the behavior of dogs on this island. Unlike in the Western world, dogs here are incredibly well behaved. They sit and stay where they're told, they don't chase after people, and they don't bark. I don't know what the Japanese secret for training dogs is, but if I were a dog person, I would certainly try to find out.

However, my opinion about the behavior of dogs has recently changed. For, by my sleep deprived estimation, 9 straight days, I had been woken up in the wee hours of the morning [i.e. anywhere from 7 AM to 9 AM] by my neighbor's evil little dog's yapping. And it hasn't been just occasional yapping. This dog barks at everything! People walking by get barked at, strange noises get barked at, birds get barked at. And then the neighbor's child gets involved and starts barking at the dog, which, in turn, makes the damn thing bark more.

This evil dog would wake me up occasionally before, but that would be maybe once every week. Now that it's starting to warm up, the housewife has been keeping her sliding glass door open, which means the dog barks at everything constantly.

In the interest of my sanity, something had to be done. I decided that killing it would be the most surefire way to fix this problem, but there could maybe be legal complications associated with that. I thought about calling the cops--especially after an hour of dog barking and baby crying starting at 7 AM on a Saturday! Where the fuck was the damn mother?!--but, unfortunately, one must speak Japanese to call the cops. I decided that the best thing to do would be to write a letter.

I allowed myself time to calm down before writing the letter, if only because most of the things I was thinking can't be translated into Japanese. [Never trust a language that doesn't use profanity!] I wrote what I considered to be a rather polite letter and my Head Teacher offered to translate it for me. When she returned the letter to me, she told me that she had written something along the lines of, "My American friend has a complaint about your dog," and then translated my letter into the second person. This was not at all what I had wanted. First off, I didn't want the lady to know I was American. It didn't seem very pertinent to the issue, and, to be quite honest, I didn't want it to effect whether she did something about the beast's yapping. Second, I didn't want her to write the damn translation under my original letter. It just looks bad.

I took what my Head Teacher had given me and asked one of the Japanese teachers to rewrite what she had written, minus any references to me being an American.

On my way home, I stopped by the house of the evil dog and lazy housewife [who does nothing when their child has been crying for an hour?!] and dropped the note in the mailbox. This morning, I woke up to the sound of my alarm for the first time in what was beginning to feel like months. Of course, the dog was still barking, but this time it wasn't out on the balcony barking directly at my window.

1 Comments:

At 8:02 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

lol... did you really have "or Evil Bitch" written on the letter? Better be careful. You might find a curiously blue tinted bottle of cola on your doorstep;)

 

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