Sat, 31 May 2008

Moe-tan's Revenge

This is a comment I posted on Kotaku, in response to the news that another jailbait English tutorial program is being published for the Nintendo DS.

Once upon a time, I spent two years in Japan on a working holiday teaching English. I taught at a junior highschool.

A lot of the lesson plans were really boring, so I was always on the lookout for new materials. One night, I was browsing the language section at the Kinokuniya bookstore in Kawagoe, and I saw one of these "Moe English" books ("Moe-tan: Methodology of English, the Academic Necessity"). I opened it, and the first example sentence was something like, "I will destroy the world with my army of killer robots."

"Fuck yes!" I thought, "These will be great." I bought one, and the girl behind the counter wrapping it up in brown paper didn't really tip me off, because they do that for everything.

Fast forward to Monday, and I threw it down on my hardass co-teacher's desk. "We're going to find a way to use some of this vocabulary. Kids love robots." He opened it at random to see "Magical Henshin #11", a picture of a ten year old girl having her bare ass molested by a wisp of smoke or something. Silence. Throat clearing. "X-sensei, I'm not sure this appropriate."

In closing screw the makers of this entire segment of the educational sector for what was possibly the most embarassing thing that has happened to me at work, ever.

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