Dana Goes to Japan

2003-08-29T23:20:00.000-07:00

Back in the USA
The adventure in Japan is over, so begins a new adventure in grad school. Come join me now at MSU.

2003-07-24T22:32:00.000-07:00

Around the World
Where's Dana now? Click to find out.

2003-07-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

Things I Will Miss About Japan
convenience stores
snack foods
soba
the subway
trains
riding the shinkansen early in the morning
kids riding double on their friends’ bikes
electronics
Muji
Uniqlo
pretty yen bills
feeling tall
everything seeming new and interesting, all the time
incense wafting through the air as I walk past a temple and graveyard
Hirose-gawa
the Date Masamune statue in Sendai Station
cell phones
Engrish
the world’s friendliest and most earnest customer service
all the people I met here

So long, and thanks for all the fish! So ends my saga in Japan...

2003-07-24T02:32:00.000-07:00

There It Goes
Well, that’s about it. At 4:20 this afternoon, a very nice Australian man called me to tell me the moving truck was on its way to my house to pick all my stuff for sea mail shipping. He said it sounded like I was very organized and ready to go, after ascertaining that I had already written out the packing lists, labeled all the boxes, and dealt with labeling my suitcase appropriately as well. If I was well organized, I wonder what other people are usually doing when the moving truck arrives. Still packing? None of the boxes are closed yet? They can’t read instructions on how to label things? Yeesh. Here I was worried I had missed something important.

Anyway, about 10 minutes after Craig called, saying the truck was 15-30 minutes away, the truck arrived. Gotta love the Japanese sense of “on time.” If it’s not 5 minutes early, it’s late. There was only one man, and we had a lovely little confused conversation about whether there were breakables or electronics in the various boxes. He then hauled it all, small boxes, heavy book boxes (yes, two of them, I wouldn’t want to be inconsistent about my reading habits in a foreign country), and then the huge box and the monster purple suitcase, down my narrow little stairs without seeming to have much problem. I applauded him.

Now all that remains is to pack what will be going on the plane with me, possibly mail myself some extra stuff by regular mail, get through one more day of work, and then I’m off to Germany and France for 10 days before I hit US soil again. I was even clever and called to confirm my flight. I’m looking forward to my flight on Malaysian Air, as all reports make it out to be excellent, and it sure as heck has got to beat Delta. I think I am becoming a somewhat jaded airline traveler.

Tomorrow afternoon, I turn my trusty phone over to Kamiyama-sensei, who will see if the new ALT wants to take over its contract. This means that tomorrow at school is my last chance for internet access, and therefore blog updating, so consider this the penultimate entry.

It’s been fun, y’all.

2003-07-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

Grinnell PSA
We interrupt the regular Japan content of this blog to bring other Grinnellians this important announcement.

Please go sign the Plans petition here.

Thank you.

(If you did not go to Grinnell College and have no idea what Plans are, you may ignore this.)

2003-07-23T06:46:00.000-07:00

The Horror
It finally happened. I was almost through my whole 12 months in Japan without once going to a karaoke palace, and I was happy with that. But no, it was not to be. Last night, my perfect record was ruined as I was dragged off to a “second party” following my farewell dinner with teachers from Mukaiyama.

Let me start with the dinner. It was the more pleasant part of the evening, the part I would prefer to remember. Kamiyama-sensei had arranged everything, when I said I had no real preference or specific ideas about where to go. It turned out to be a very nice traditional Japanese restaurant, and the party was fairly small. It was mostly just the English department and a few of the teachers who have been especially nice to me, like tiny little Ms. Handa, who sat across from me last academic year, and the current 1-5 homeroom teacher, who always likes to talk to me from the end of our row of desks. Ms. Kokuta wanted to come, but had to stay at school overnight with the girls’ volleyball and basketball teams. She gave me a present of two more Kitty-chan phone danglies, because she remembered me buying the one in Fukushima. Also, the kyoto-sensei wanted to come, but he had to go visit another teacher in the hospital. I found out later that the restaurant was one of his favorites, so I think he suggested it.

The dinner was a procession of about 7 courses, all meticulously arranged. My favorite was the long, skinny rectangular plates of three little bite-sized arrangements of fish and meat, with a flying fish fin standing as the decoration in the middle. I also liked the tower of tempura squares, with one tempura-ed asparagus shoot leaning on the tower at an angle. Additionally, I wasn’t the only one not drinking alcohol, which made everything that much less awkward when dealing with ordering drinks.

I was sitting across from Kamiyama-sensei, and in between Mr. Yokota and Mr. Kasahara. No Japanese party, particularly a farewell party, is complete without speeches, so each person had to take a turn in addition to the opening, closing, and toast speeches. Mr. Yokota, who was my supervisor last year, gave his speech after a number of beers, and spent much of the time asking me if I remembered my first day in Sendai, when he had come to pick me up from the BOE after the arrival ceremony. This brought up the story of how they decided on the kanji characters for my hanko with Mr. Yamagata, so my hanko had to be passed around and inspected. Mr. Kasahara’s speech was actually very quiet and serious, surprising many of the other teachers as being rather out of character.

But then Mr. Kasahara needed to go home to his children, and Ms. Chiba needed to go home to study, since she was taking the test to become a full-time teacher today, so the first party broke up. I would have been just as happy to go home then, but I was informed that Mr. Kikuchi had given money when he found out he couldn’t come, (due to having to visit the parents of a student being disciplined), and we simply had to use it to go sing karaoke. And wouldn’t you know, there was a karaoke palace just around the corner! Oh, goody!

There were only 5 of us who went, me, Mr. Yokota, Mr. Kamiyama, and two other teachers. All of them were men at least twice my age, and when they declined the nomihodai (all you can drink) option for the karaoke package, it set a kind of tame mood. Thank goodness. Most of the songs chosen were the ever popular Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, or the Eagles. There was some Celine Dion and Louis Armstrong thrown in for good measure. When Eric Clapton’s “Change the World” came up, you could definitely tell it was a group of nerdy English teachers, because in between verses, the comment was, “Hey, look, it’s all in the subjunctive!”

The funniest thing was the video playing behind the words. Because most of the songs chosen were oldies from before the era of music videos, the karaoke company just had random scenery from various large cities around the world, most notably London, Rome, San Francisco, and New York. Except all the footage was from the 80s, so the Twin Towers still existed and ugly cars figured prominently in street scenes. Only the two Japanese songs seemed to have videos that tried to match the songs. When Puff the Magic Dragon came up, the video was not the world scenery, but instead this incredibly 80s-chic Japanese woman walking around looking pensive outdoors, at one point artistically pouring bottled water out artistically so she could watch it fall.

I sort of sang two songs. Fortunately for me, the microphone didn’t pick up my voice almost at all. I have noticed that many Japanese people have amazing mastery of handheld microphones, such as students at the school festival and whatnot, and now I know why. Because they’re all obsessed with karaoke. Maybe I wasn’t holding the microphone right, or whatever, but I’m grateful for small favors. Also, I think Kamiyama-sensei was right when he said later that no one pays attention when other people are singing anyway, since they’re all looking for the next song they want to sing in the book. Perhaps that is also out of self-defense, since I also noticed that there is something about karaoke that makes everyone try to sing in a really stupid falsetto.

So I survived karaoke. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It is also not something I would willingly subject myself to ever again. But now I’ve done it, so my Japanese experience is complete. Guess there’s nothing to do now but go home, right?

2003-07-21T02:33:00.000-07:00

Roaming Culture
You know, the nice thing about living in Japan is that I don’t have to do anything in order to have an interesting life. It just happens. Sometimes, it even comes right to me. I can be totally lazy, and still fulfill my duty to you, my loving audience. Amazing.

Yesterday, I was sitting in my apartment, pondering how much I did not want to be packing all my stuff and trying to think of a good reason to procrastinate, when I heard drumming in the street. There have been flags up all over the neighborhood, advertising the upcoming festival for Atago Jinja, the shrine on the hill behind my house, and the temple at the other end of the street is all fixed up, too, so I went to the window to see what was going on. As it turned out, it was the procession carrying the Atago Jinja portable shrine. First was a very slow-moving truck carrying the taiko drum, with a man walking behind it to beat it. Then there were three priests, two banner carriers, and the little shrine, with about 20 men supporting it, and a crowd of relief carriers or otherwise hangers-on. I was the only person who came out on the street to see it, so the procession spent about as much time looking at me, the strange gaijin girl, as I did looking at them. I had my camera, though, so I think I win the gawking contest.

When I say it was a portable shrine, I really do mean a perfect tiny replica of a very ornate shrine building. Little steps with railings, lots of gold scrollwork, dangly bits hanging from the ends of the rafters, and a big metal phoenix at the apex of the roof. All Shinto shrines have one. The end of July and beginning of August is matsuri season, or festival season, when it seems like all shrines and temples have events.

In the afternoon, I went downtown to do some final shopping on Ichi-ban-cho, and this was conclusively demonstrated by a much larger procession of not one, but three, larger and ever more ornate shrines from the area around downtown. The first one had a tiny woman up on the front of the shrine carrying base, holding onto the corner post and waving a fan back and forth in time to chanting bearers. Luckily, I had my camera there, too, so hopefully my pictures will come out well when I get back to the US. It is too bad that I’m going to miss Tanabata this year, though.

Plea for Entertainment
I don’t like packing my entire apartment. I need to take breaks every few hours. If you love me, you will send me email, so when I obsessively check, I will not just sit in front of the computer pointlessly combing the internet for random entertainment. Pretty please? I’m not allowed to go outside anymore until I’m done, so it’s up to you to keep me sane.

2003-07-19T05:05:00.000-07:00

Sukiyaki Party
Last night, my landlords invited me to their apartment for dinner. About a month ago, before they took their vacation to Russia, I had been over to their office for tea, and it was determined that I had not had sukiyaki. This would not do. I had to have it before I left Japan. Thus, my farewell party.

At 7:00, I went across the street, bearing NC taffy in a tin I had cleverly covered in origami paper so it didn’t say it was oatmeal anymore. It’s amazing what one can do in 5 minutes with paper, scissors, and tape when attempting to be creative. Presentation is half the gift in Japan, and unfortunately, the original box had gotten rather squished. Apparently, I chose well, because my landlady seemed to like it.

When I came in, she did the modest housewife thing, which must be scripted the world over. “I’m sorry, it’s very small, not much to look at, please come in.” Really, their apartment is very nice. My estimation of “small” has become somewhat different after living in my apartment all year. I mean, they have a whole actual kitchen! Amazing. The living room is full of displays of things they’ve picked up in their travels around the world, but unlike many Japanese homes, it manages to not seem overly cluttered.

On the coffee table/kotatsu in the middle of the room, a feast was set up. Sukiyaki is made in a kind of cross between an electric frying pan and a crock pot. First, Mrs. Watanabe greased the bottom of the pan, then added soy sauce and sake. When it had heated a bit, she started adding the main raw ingredients set up on a platter on the side; cabbage, about 4 kinds of mushrooms, konyaku noodles, tofu cubes, and very thinly sliced beef. She then cracked a raw egg in each of 3 small bowls, set them at our places, and bade us dig in. Everyone just took what they wanted from the pot in the middle with their own hashi (chopsticks), dipped it hot into the egg, and ate. I was kind of wary of the egg, but I swear Japanese eggs taste far less strong than eggs in the US, so it was good. I also haven’t died yet, so I don’t think I got salmonella either, despite the horror stories of my childhood.

But wait! There’s more! In addition to the huge amount of food cut up for the sukiyaki, which was quite filling on its own, there was also preparations for homemade sushi rolls. Each of us had a plate with small squares of nori (seaweed paper). There was a large bowl of sticky rice, and then various sushi toppings. Or middles, I guess, since it got rolled up. You can figure it out. There was cucumber, miso pickles, salmon, tuna (“sea chicken”), caviar, eggplant, umeboshi (pickled plums), and natto (weird sticky fermented beans). We spread rice on the nori, added whatever else we wanted, rolled it up, and ate. Very good. Do you see now why I want a Japanese wife? Really, I want a private Japanese chef.

During the course of the evening, we talked about all sorts of things. We compared the US and Japanese high school educational system and determined that the Japanese do math really well, whereas the US does far and away better with foreign language. I don’t really know about any of the other classes. We talked about their trip to Russia. The brought back 5 sets of the little nesting dolls, and told me to pick the one I liked best to have as a gift. My landlady won their bet about which one I would pick, when I chose the green one with white flowers. My landlord’s favorite was the natural wood one with gold painting. Their pictures are still being developed, so there isn’t an amazing scrapbook yet, so we had to make do with the picture calendars they got. They had traveled the Golden Ring, which they said was beautiful, but did not find the Russian people to be as friendly to lost tourists as people in other countries. My landlady then found the set of Japanese traditional prints she had been looking for last time I was in their office, and told me to pick out two. They give each ALT they get to know their choice. They were all lovely, but eventually I chose one of a woman combing her hair, and one of two women by the ocean.

For dessert, Mrs. Watanabe and I had red tea from one of their Middle East trips, grapes, and cookies from Hokkaido. Mr. Watanabe declined his cookie and most of his grapes, because he was drinking alcohol. We decided that I would eat his cookie for him, because he was drinking my alcohol for me. Then we got into a discussion about the food in America and in Japan, particularly serving sizes. The Japanese interpretation of American steaks is that they are as thick as mattresses, and nearly as big. I said that many people in the US get too big because they eat too much, and I liked Japanese portions better. But I added that Mark eats and eats, and stays really skinny. My landlady said, “Ah, he gets (consult electronic dictionary) very bad mileage. Like an American car. Much fuel, few miles.” I laughed a lot. It’s probably the most original, and accurate, way of putting it I’ve ever heard. I, on the other hand, am like a Japanese car, small and able to run on little food.

When they tried the taffy, they thought it was good. They said when they were growing up, there was no candy in Japan, except what the US soldiers gave out to children. Now, children in Japan just think candy is normal. Then Mrs. Watanabe made me little boxes of rice and sushi toppings, plus some nori, and gave me instructions on what to refrigerate and what not to. I made myself a little feast for dinner tonight, too. Yum, yum, yum.

2003-07-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

See You!
Today was quite a day. In fact, I’m having to split it into two parts, it was so full. Tonight, I shall tell you about the work part of my day. It was rather full. I got to teach two classes in the morning and give a speech in English and Japanese both at each school in the afternoon. But let’s start at the beginning.

This morning, I went to Minami as usual. Because they were having the closing ceremony for summer vacation in the afternoon, the schedule was all different. Not that such an occurrence is at all unusual. Once I figured out my schedule, I found out I had classes back-to-back in the second and third periods, just before lunch. The first class was with Ms. Shiokai, and since she is now the head English teacher, or at least the head first-year teacher, the principal had asked if he could visit one of her classes. This is the man who lived in New York for 5 years, working at the Manhattan branch of the Japanese 77 Bank. His English is very good, and I’m not really sure why he decided to become a principal. Anyway, about halfway through the lesson, he came and amazed all the students. His English is really better than most of the English teachers. Today’s lesson was about introducing one’s family, so he talked a bit about his daughters. One of them in working for MTV in New York now, which of course was very impressive. Ms. Shiokai had also planned a game where she asked the students multiple choice questions about me and Mr. Sato. Things like, “What is Dana-sensei’s favorite kanji of these three?” and, “What is kocho-sensei’s dream?” Oh, and, “How many centimeters taller than Dana is kocho-sensei?” Mr. Sato also revealed his weight to the class, but I declined. Not really because I care, but because I haven’t got a clue what I weigh in kilograms. I emphasized to the class that he is tall in both Japan and the US, since he is 6’1”.

Then I taught my last class with Mr. Takisawa, the cute part-time teacher who sits next to me. The lesson in that class was about looking sad or happy, and giving the reason why, so I wandered around the class a lot embarrassing students who thought they had finished talking to their partners for the assignment and could then speak in Japanese or sleep. Nothing like seeing that look of panic as the teacher is all of a sudden standing over your desk, asking, “And you? Are you happy or sad today? Oh, really? What happened?” That aside, I think they actually had fun. It was a pretty easy lesson. And they did all look sad when I told them I was leaving and they should be nice to the new ALT. After class, I found out that Mr. Takisawa was on his way to Nagoya for a job interview at another school. He taught at a private school before, but quit so he could go to grad school full time. Now, though, he’s almost done with that, and doesn’t want to be a part time teacher after this school year is over. I hope he did well on his English exams. He kept asking me for help and clarification while he was studying for them.

In the afternoon, both school’s were having closing ceremonies. Today was the last day of school before the month-long August vacation. (I only mean vacation loosely, of course, because most of the students will still come to school for club activities nearly all day, every day.) There had been much discussion between my two schools about how to coordinate my attendance at each ceremony, because it was also to be my farewell ceremony. At Minami, my farewell started the whole thing. Mr. Sato gave a speech thanking me and talking about what I would be doing next year, all in English. He gave me a signed copy of it, as well. Then I gave a short speech in English (“I had fun teaching you, I hope you will continue to study English, blah, blah.”) and then in Japanese, (trans. “Everyone, my year in Japan was wonderful. It was a good experience. Truly, thank you very much,”). After I was done, a student representative brought me a huge bouquet of flowers. It was very sweet. Apparently, the International Communication Club had planned to give me a party after school, too, but I had to go to Mukaiyama right after my speech, so one of them gave me a letter from her before I left.

Then, after my speech, I went and got my bag, walked to the office with all my stuff, and got picked up by Miwa-sensei to go to Mukaiyama. There, my farewell was at the end of the ceremony. I got to listen to the principal admonish the students not to have part-time jobs, to study, and to read enlightening books, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in translation, over the summer. Somehow, I’m not convinced they are going to take his advice. Two other teachers gave little advice speeches, too, and then the principal introduced me. This principal does not speak English, and in truth, I have no idea what he said, other than he mentioned America a lot. I gave my little speech, no one gave me flowers, and the ceremony was over. But then I went back to the staff room, where I attempted to put my desk in some sort of order, and all of the second-year classes sent representatives to me with cards signed by the whole class. I also got a letter from the girl in Kamiyama-sensei’s homeroom who is going on an 11-month exchange program to Ohio and Wisconsin, leaving next week, who came to ask me questions about America during lunch yesterday. And yesterday, both of Ms. Chiba’s first year classes gave me crane chains with messages written on the birds’ wings. I feel loved. Yay! My favorite comments were the ones saying, “I didn’t like English, but now I do,” or, “I don’t like English, but I like your class.”

2003-07-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Funerals
As I mentioned, I asked Mr. Kamiyama what the difference between a vigil and a funeral was, but he said he didn’t know. Today, he asked Mr. Nagane, who in addition to being young, just married, and a social studies teacher, also turns out to be a trained Buddhist priest. He said that a Buddhist funeral is actually an entrance ceremony for the person’s spirit into the next world. The person, who is no longer mortal, is given a new name, usually much longer and written completely in kanji characters, to start their new life. The vigil, on the other hand, is really just a ceremony at which friends and acquaintances can demonstrate their sympathy toward the remaining family members.

2003-07-17T03:39:00.000-07:00

Night
Last week, I was walking home from the subway station. It was night, after dinner, about 9:00. As I walked past the Buddhist temple, three men were working by the light of a lantern in the small shrine outside the main temple, repainting the tiny portable shrine house inside with equally tiny brushes. I looked up at the large hill across the bridge, where my giant cell tower lives, and saw that the misty clouds stood so low, they were touching the tops of the hills. The tower had completely disappeared, it’s mellow floodlights unable to pierce the mist to light even the base. There were no cars on either my small bridge or the larger one also spanning the river just a block’s distance away as I paused to listen to the water running in the Hirose-gawa, the leaves rustling on the vines growing on the steep banks, and the insects chirping in the dark. The street lights reflected in the water, making the ripples sparkle. All this was mine.

2003-07-16T07:02:00.000-07:00

Hydrangeas
Apparently, the color of hydrangeas is affected by the acidity of the soil. I found this out this weekend. Right now, all the hydrangeas in Sendai are blooming, and they look quite startling. I’m used to the plain white snowball bushes, or the very light blue ones. In Japan, they show up in deep Carolina blue, brilliant fuchsia, and purple, sometimes all on the same bush. On my way home from Mukaiyama, there is a daycare center playground at the bottom of a steep hillside. The hillside is covered with hydrangea bushes, and once they started blooming, the hill looked dotted with bright balls of blue and pink amidst all the usual tangled green. It makes me smile every day I walk past. On the way to Minami, there is a house with windows facing the sidewalk beside the river. The windows are covered with shoji screens patterned with birds made of wood, and when if the person inside were to open the screens, they would be looking at the trunk of a large cherry tree and the blue-and-purple blooms of the big hydrangea growing at the tree’s base. I wish I lived in that room.

Ticketed
On my walk home this afternoon, there was inexplicably a little convention of 5 police officers at the corner in front of the Milky Way, right where I needed to cross the big road to be on my street. I really have no idea why they were there. It was most unfortunate for one of my students that they were there, though. I don’t know what he did, maybe ride his bike too fast on the sidewalk, or go across the street while the crosswalk light was red, or something, but whatever it was, one of the policemen stepped out with his little wand, stopped him, and gave him a ticket. My student needed to go past me to continue on his way, and he was so embarrassed. He came to a stop next to me, but was looking down and away, too ashamed to look at me. When I asked him what had happened, he tried to explain what he had done wrong, but all I caught was, “[Something] is bad. You’re not supposed to [do it].” Poor kid. Getting caught is bad enough, but to have it happen in front of a teacher must be a Japanese student’s worst nightmare, given how much responsibility teachers in Japan are given for basically raising their students. Good thing I’m not his homeroom teacher. He’d wish the ground had swallowed him instead.

2003-07-15T05:05:00.000-07:00

Vigil
This past Saturday, Mr. Yamagata, the ex-principal of Mukaiyama who retired in March, died suddenly of what I was told was an "aneurysm of the aorta." This was very unexpected. His parents are still alive, both in their 90s, as well as his wife and three grown daughters. Mr. Kamiyama told me that even though he had been a principal for many years, and at many schools, he did not like it as much because he could no longer teach classes. After retiring, he got a part-time job as a world history teacher again at one of the private high schools in Sendai, and was eagerly looking forward to teaching in the classroom again. He actually had Mr. Kasahara as one of his students, back before he became a principal.

Mr. Kamiyama sent me an email to tell me the news yesterday while I was at Minami. He said that since the funeral will be held during the day later this week, many of the teachers could not go and were planning to go to the vigil this evening. I asked if I could go as well. Mr. Yamagata was a very kind man, who always took time to speak to me in his very minimal English. He was the one who, last fall (October 24, 2002), took me for tea at a traditional teahouse and told me all about his family and growing up in Sendai. When he retired, he had a friend who is a potter make custom tea mugs for everyone on the staff.

Because he had been a principal at so many schools, taught many people, and worked at the kencho for 3 years as well, his vigil was completely full. After school this afternoon, I went with Mr. Kamiyama to the funeral hall. When we came in, we signed the guest registry and handed the attendants special funerary envelopes with ¥3000 inside. Then the attendants, most of them teachers from Mukaiyama, gave each person a token bag, which apparently has green tea and some other kind of small gift inside, as well as a card with the death announcement on it.

The vigil was held in an auditorium. Almost all of the regular seats were full when we arrived, so the ushers were trying to fill in the empty seats. There ended up being two empty in the front row of the left section, and we were put there. Mr. Kamiyama was rather uncomfortable, because those seats are usually for people very close to the deceased, but it did afford me an unobstructed view of everything. After we had come in, they brought in extra chairs and filled in all of the area in the back of the auditorium, in between the tables that had been set up with food for people who were staying afterward.

At exactly 6:00pm, the vigil began with the raising of the thin curtain on the stage at the front. There was a display covering the wall of a model temple as the background for a center display of white orchids surrounding the portrait of Mr. Yamagata, smiling and happy, more casual than he ever was at work. On the tier below this were hundreds of unopened white chrysanthemums arranged on ferns, which gradually grew to palm fronds and unopened white day lilies at the sides of the display. From the back of the room, a bell began to ring, and three priests proceeded to the stage. The bell ringer, dressed in purple and tan robes, took his place on the right side of the stage, on the chair in front of the two gongs, one large and one small, shaped like bowls. The priest carrying a tall stick of incense, dressed in light green and saffron, took the chair at the right, in front of the carved wooden drum. The head priest, in burgundy with gold embroidery, took the central seat, facing the display, in front of an incense bowl. They all began to chant, with gong ringing from the right, rhythmic rubbing of the head priest’s prayer beads, and putting more incense into the bowl at certain intervals. The chanting had a constant underlying drone because at least one of them was always keeping it going, even when the others had stopped to draw breath. I’m not actually sure they were all chanting the same parts in unison anyway. At times it seemed more like a round. Since I’ve never seen a Buddhist chanting ritual before, I don’t really know.

After about 20 minutes, the gong ringer began to ring the smaller gong more often, the head priest rubbed his prayer beads for longer, and then the large gong was struck with finality, bringing the impressive chanting to an end. The gong ringer began another chant on his own, while the priest on the left picked up his stick and began to beat the carved drum in front of him. The announcer at the microphone on one side of the auditorium stepped forward and announced that Mr. Yamagata’s wife and perhaps his brother would now light the first incense at the 10 or so boxes at the edge of the stage for that purpose. Then his children and parents came forward and did so. Then everyone else in the auditorium did the same. The boxes held loose grain incense on one side, in a separate compartment, and on the other side of the divider was a bed with a piece of hot charcoal in it to sprinkle the incense over. As the last people were coming forward to do this, Mr. Kamiyama motioned to me to move with them to the back of the auditorium so we wouldn’t be in the front row anymore.

After everyone was back in their seats again, either Mr. Yamagata’s wife or one of his daughters, I could no longer see, made a short speech, and everyone bowed. Then the priests recessed out, ringing the hand bell, and everyone made their way out. Mr. Kamiyama said this was much shorter than an actual funeral service would be, since it was only half an hour, but he couldn’t really explain what would be done differently at a full funeral service. He did say, however, that is required by law in Japan that all bodies be cremated.

2003-07-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Free Talk
Today I taught two of my very last classes at Minami. Friday is my last day there, and it’s the same day as the closing ceremony for summer vacation for all high schools. This does mean that my Friday is going to be kind of busy, since I have to be there for the ceremony to give a farewell speech at both schools, but I’ll get to that later this week.

My first class this morning was with one of Ms. Shiokai’s classes, with one boy on the front row who always knows the answer and is always talking, except you can’t get mad at him, because he’s usually translating the more difficult English words for the people around him, or answering the question meant for someone else, correctly. One of the girls from the International Communication club is also in that class. The lesson for them was on introducing family members, and the last activity was to draw a picture of their family and use it to introduce the people. Japanese students are such good artists. I liked walking around seeing all their drawings, and they were good at telling me who the drawing was. I really hope I’ve prepared them enough to feel pretty comfortable with the new ALT. This year’s first year students at both schools have been much more willing to speak in oral communication class, and I’d hate it if they got all shy about talking to the new girl.

The next class, though, was the really good one. Mr. Endo had no lesson plan, because he didn’t want two of his three classes to get a lesson ahead of the other one just before summer vacation, so he said today was “free talk” for my last class. I started by talking about why I was going back to the US. I astounded them all by writing the kanji for “linguistics” on the board, since they definitely didn’t know what that word meant. Even though I spoke only in English, and there was no script in the textbook or anything to look at, they understood almost all that I said without Mr. Endo having to translate much. This is one of Minami’s all-girl classes, and when Mr. Endo told them they could ask me questions, they had lots of things to ask me. There was the usual “Do you like sushi?” and “Can you use chopsticks?” but also “Is there a Tanabata Festival in the US? Do you like Tanabata in Japan or there best?,” “What is your favorite traditional Japanese thing?,” “Do you like Japanese language?,” “What was the most surprising thing about Japan?,” and a bunch of other ones. The girls asked them all in English, with relatively little help from the teacher, too.

When they seemed to be running out of questions, I told them about my successor. I asked if anyone was in the brass band, and the two girls who were (percussion and clarinet) looked very happy when I said she played the flute and they should talk to her about music. Then I told them that she speaks Ukrainian with her mother and grandmother at home in England. One of the girls asked if Russian and Ukrainian were very similar to English, so I drew them a language family chart on the board, and they understood it. Then someone asked if they could take a picture, and three of them turned out to have disposable cameras in their bags, so the entire class gathered at the front of the room and we took a group picture, complete with peace signs. As Mr. Endo and I were walking up the stairs to go back to the staff room after class, two girls holding hands for mutual support caught me to ask one last question, the ever fascinating, “Will you marry with your boyfriend?” I’m sad to leave that class, and really, a lot of my students.

2003-07-14T04:59:00.000-07:00

Bugger Off Brai
Yesterday, Sunday, Danola had organized what she called the “Bugger Off Brai” as a farewell party for those of us in the Shiogama clan who are leaving. “Brai” is Afrikaans for “barbecue” or “cookout.” Of course, it didn’t quite work that way, because it turns out there are lots of regulations about having an open flame except in certain designated places, so it ended up being more of a picnic. What’s more, Danola didn’t even come, because she had gone off to climb Mt. Fuji with some other group of JETs, and her shinkansen didn’t get back to Sendai until about halfway through the party. Some hostess she is.

What we did end up doing was meeting Alex at Tagajo train station and following him to the Tagajo Green Space. “We” in this case was me, John, and Oliver from Sendai; Sharon, Kristel, Laura, Alex, and his girlfriend Kayoko from Tagajo/Shiogama; and one science teacher from Alex and Sharon’s school. Richard was supposed to come, too, but cancelled due to a migraine. The Green Space was quite a walk from the station, but the walk was very nice, all along the side of the river there, with many fish jumping in the water, and actually pleasant temperatures under a sky that never actually rained on us.

The Green Space was very pretty. There were some sports fields at the end we came in on, then a very interesting fountain in the middle, with lots of sort of torch shapes making a little water spout forest, and then the grassy area with lots of little trees where we spread out our picnic things. Being a Japanese picnic, we were of course prepared with ground covers, and everyone took off their shoes before sitting down. Kristel had gotten very much into the spirit of things and probably brought more than half the food, including pasta salad, watermelon, and grapes. Alex, the strict vegetarian, had brought potato salad spiced up with totally fake bacon bits. I brought little individual stick slices of cheesecake on a kind of baklava base, because they just remodeled the part of Sendai Station next to the ticket machines and evilly put in a cheesecake shop. Danola was with me when I noticed it, and drooled over the prospect of cheesecake, but since she wasn’t there, she didn’t get any. Neener, neener. I’ll be seeing her before I leave, anyway.

Out of the group there, Alex and I turned out to be the only ones really leaving Japan. Sharon isn’t on the JET program anymore, either, so the school she shares with Alex will get two new ALTs next year. She’s going to be a receptionist at one of the private language schools in Sendai, and will actually be moving to Itsutsubashi, which is the neighborhood just 5 minutes north of me, towards Sendai Station. She is very sad that I’m leaving, but she can still visit Richard easily from there, too, and my successor will be in my apartment. On the walk to the Green Space, Alex and I had fun discussing a fantastic fantasy series that his brother had loaned him, and then he loaned to me, actually before he had read them himself, and he wanted to clarify some of the points he didn’t feel like he’d really understood, since I’ve actually read more of the books than he has now. Me being me, I would have happily discussed that for the rest of the time, but strangely, not everyone else seemed as fascinated. When we got to the picnic spot, we all started talking about various things we liked about Japan and our home countries, why students giggle when they hear ALTs say things in Japanese, and Sharon discovered that the name of one of her favorite Japanese foods is also a slang word for certain bits of male anatomy, kind of like ordering eggs in Mexico. She was horribly embarrassed.

After we decimated the food, we played a very pitiful game of soccer with a ball Kristel had discovered in one of the cupboards of her apartment. This is what it’s like to be in a predecessor-apartment. You can find all sorts of strange and bizarre things, even nearly a year after you move in. My own apartment was pretty bare in that regard, but Danola and Kristel are both still finding things tucked away in random little corners. The game ended in a tie, after my team demanded that we switch goals, because our trees were much farther apart than the opposing team’s goal trees.

After that, people were feeling tired, so we packed up and began the walk back. Kayoko took all the Tagajo/Shiogama people in her car, and John, Oliver, and I walked back to the train station. The party had started at 1:30, and we didn’t get back to Sendai until 7. Saying good-bye to people at Kayoko’s car took a long time, as some of us realized we really wouldn’t be seeing each other again. This group is notorious for not being able to leave parties in a timely fashion, and this time was even worse. I’m sure I’ll be hearing from them all again, though. The internet is a wonderful thing.

2003-07-13T04:59:00.000-07:00

Let’s Do Lunch
Friday was, as I mentioned, the second day of the sports festival at Minami. Sure enough, when I got to school, the enthusiastic English teacher was there, waiting for me. He took me to see his third-year homeroom class compete in the very first events of the day, since they had done well the day before. It seems that on Minami’s first day, they played all the preliminary basketball and soccer games, but it seems like most of the volleyball was left for the second day. This teacher’s class, 3-4, had done well in boy’s soccer and basketball. They were finalists for soccer, playing against another third year class, none of whom I have taught at all, since I only teach first year students at this school. Even with the year change, I only know students in the first two years there. At Mukaiyama, I know all the students.

The final soccer match started at 9am, under glaring overcast skies, on a very wet and muddy field. The sponges they had put down in front of the goals had done all they could to soak up the water, but could only do so much. For all that, it was a lot of fun to watch. I thought it was especially funny to watch the boys suddenly start running really carefully on the one corner of the field with sparse grass on it, because it became extra slippery over there. The referees all immediately opted to go barefoot. Unlike Mukaiyama, there is no rule that club members can’t participate in their own sport, so there were some very good players on the field, much to the misfortune of the goalie from the basketball team, since in the end, the game came down to a PK sudden death match.

After that, and several changes of shoes, we went in to see the 3-4 boys play basketball. They won, with a lot of help from the one star boy who rarely missed a shot. As the teacher said, “He’s on the basketball team, so I feel kind of bad [for the other team].” I kind of wish all basketball games were like the sports festival ones, only 15 minutes long. I can actually stay interested for that long.

Then the teacher bought me ice cream in the cafeteria, since the sun actually came out and suddenly the temperature rose about 10 degrees for the first time in a week, and we went back to the staff room, where yes, I admit it, I did read my book. But then I got up and wandered around outside with my camera, watching the girls practicing for their volleyball matches in the afternoon. I found one team of girls that I taught last year. Several of them I remembered as being very eager to participate in class, and they waved and smiled when they saw me watching them. One of them got the boy acting as their team manager to take a picture of us together. Another of them is the girl I pass every day on my way to Mukaiyama, who after many months of seeing me, actually smiles at me spontaneously when we pass each other. I was amused to note that she was playing volleyball with perfectly manicured nails.

While I was watching them, the social studies teacher I made friends with at the beginning of the year invited me to go out to lunch with him and another social studies teacher. I said I wanted to wait to see the girls play, since it was very soon, and he told me to find him afterward. I did indeed watch the girls play, as well as several other teams before them, but they lost in the end. It was still fun to see them play, since even in the course of a rather short game, they got measurably better.

Then I did go find Itami-sensei. He got permission from the kyoto-sensei for us to leave, and we went outside and met his friend, who was going to drive us to the restaurant. It turned out to be in either extreme suburbs of Sendai or an entirely different town, with lots of large, modern, single-family homes. This is apparently where the other teacher lived, and a restaurant that he goes to a lot, because after he placed his order, he went over to his house to shower and change clothes, and was back before the entrée was delivered. It was a very nice, small, airy Italian restaurant, owned by an Italian man married to a Japanese woman. I think they live in Italy most of the time, but whenever they come to Japan, they import clothes and jewelry as well, and have a small boutique next to the restaurant. If I understood correctly, there is an Italian woman who is the chef in the kitchen.

Mr. Itami ordered a whole set course for me, as well as himself, and it was all so good. Japanese people take their Italian cuisine very seriously. Perhaps they identify with another culture that seems to be very into lots of courses during a meal. I’m sure the Japanese version of Italian food involves much smaller portions than what one might actually get in Italy, but that’s all fine with me. I think it’s going to be a shock to go back to Western-sized meals again in just two short weeks. Mr. Itami and I discussed European culture, books, and art for a while, which is his real love, and when his friend returned, talk turned to that man’s major in college, philosophy. Because I mostly know philosophers related to educational theory, such as John Dewey, we started talking about my area of linguistics and why it is good to learn a foreign language. I think that talking to these teachers makes it more clear that the philosophy behind teaching English in all the high schools in Japan is not so much to turn out fluent speakers, but instead to expose the students to alternative ways of thinking and much different culture, as well as gaining more appreciation for their own language. These are very good things, and it’s really the same theory underlying the foreign language requirement in US high schools and universities as well, but I still think they have separated the living parts of foreign language study from the technical (grammatical) bits entirely too much.

After the meal, the other teacher, labeled the “fighting philosopher” by Mr. Itami, took us around the neighborhood so we could see his house. He had a large yellow lab in the front yard, named Lopez after a Spanish soccer star. We got back to school just as the closing ceremony was beginning, both of them very much having enjoyed using my “farewell party” as an excuse to get out of school for nearly two whole hours in the middle of the day. I certainly didn’t object either. That’s one of the fastest days I’ve ever had at that school, and a lot more socialization than I usually get, especially from students and non-English teachers.

2003-07-10T06:05:00.000-07:00

Minami Farewell
Tonight was the night of the farewell enkai for me and the student teachers at Minami. It was at “The Wine Bar,” so I wasn’t holding out much hope for the evening. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was just the English department. What’s more, I think I paved the way for one of the student teachers to declare more comfortably that he didn’t drink alcohol either. I’m glad if I did; it’s easier for me to declare it because I’m both foreign and a woman, so I can just let them think whatever they want. Plus, this was the poor student teacher who had to team-teach with me on Monday, all on his own, and he was so nervous.

While there was lots of alcohol present, including, yes, 3 kinds of wine, as well as beer and a choice of mixed drinks, there was also, blessedly, food. I spent the beginning of the evening talking to Ms. Shiokai and Mr. Endo. Eventually, Ms. Shiokai switched places with me because Mr. Endo and I had started talking about Izumi high school and its English camp, since he just got transferred from there and was the teacher in charge of the camp when I helped with it in February. He said he went to Izumi for some event last weekend, and the students who had been at the camp knew he now works with me, so they spent most of the time asking him how I was. Awwww.

Apparently, 5 years ago, he was chosen by the Ministry of Education to spend 6 months at UC Davis, studying American schooling and living with a host family to get a truly American experience. He was very surprised to learn that different cultures use different conversational styles. Just so you know, the Japanese way is like bowling; each person step up, says their piece, everyone watches until its done, and then the next person steps up. American conversations are like basketball, with everyone passing the topic back and forth and jumping in the middle. Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian conversations are like rugby, with lots of close proximity, physical contact, and energetic shouting. He said this greatly deepened his understanding of foreign experiences.

Then I got embroiled in a discussion of foreign travel with some other teacher that I’ve never taught with, but his desk is near mine. I’ve never heard him speak that much English before. He really likes to travel and had lots of fun telling me all about his adventures traveling in Europe. He’s very happy that his children will be old enough next year to take them. He’s been waiting for 10 years for them to be big enough to make traveling worthwhile. I sure hope his kids appreciate having a dad who wants to take them all over Europe. When I said I would be going to Germany and France on my home, he had many suggestions of museums to see in Paris.

And then, then I got abandoned. All the nice people I had been talking to either had to go home or got involved in other conversations, and I was left to the mercies of the very bizarre teacher who only barely sort of speaks English. Listening to him takes a lot of concentration. It doesn’t help that he becomes somewhat, um, expansive when drunk. And chain smokes. He really, really wanted me to play volleyball tomorrow at Minami’s sports day. I think I told him about 5 times that I’d be happy to just watch, since I didn’t think telling him that I despise playing volleyball would be very diplomatic. He was concerned that I would read a book the whole time. While this is actually a somewhat valid observation, I wouldn’t do that on sports day, since there are actually things to see.

I was relieved when Mr. Yamauchi came over to join us, even though he’s not my favorite teacher, because at least his English is better and he was willing to talk about other things. He turned the conversation to whether or not I am a typical American. I said, no, probably not, because I’m very quiet and calm. The smoking teacher said that this is an important function in a social group, “kind of like a priest.” Mr. Yamauchi decided that I was more Japanese than American, but then amended it by saying that since more Japanese young people are starting to have conversations like Americans, I must be like an old Japanese woman. So I’m an old Japanese woman priest. Who would have thought?

2003-07-09T21:14:00.000-07:00

Sports Day Gossip Update
Today I ate lunch in the cafeteria with the school nurse, and got all the gossip. The boy with the broken leg will be in the hospital for a month, so there goes his summer vacation. He was from the winning class, though, so it was not all in vain, and the whole class went to visit him in the hospital yesterday after school. The boy who collapsed at the relay race is now fine. Mr. Ogata is reported to be a very able and skilled assistant, as well. So now you know.

2003-07-09T02:20:00.000-07:00

Sports Festival
These past two days have the been the school sports festival at Mukaiyama. If you want a US context to put it in, it’s kind of like elementary school field day, only more competitive and more organized. Each class competes against all the others, all three grades mixed, and at the end of the second day, the classes’ points are totaled from all the various events to see who wins the school-wide prize, which is a very impressive trophy with lots of ribbons and a large box of… something. I assume snacks.

The first day opened with the t-shirt contest. Each class designed its own t-shirt for everyone to wear. Kamiyama-sensei got an extra one for me, so I was officially part of class 2-1. Its design features a cartoon llama or something in the shape of the 2. The back says “ONE” in large English letters, with the kanji characters for “Xanadu” underneath, (no one knows why.) Other classes were better, if not necessarily more explicable. I think my favorite was the one that came in second, a black shirt with a bright yellow cartoon frog on the front, and “We are stars!” on the back, with all the students’ names. There was a class that substituted their homeroom teacher’s name in the McDonald’s golden arches on a bright red shirt; a class that parodied the Puma athletic brand with their Mr. Kumagai’s name; and a tribute to Mr. Nagane’s new wife (Mr. Nagane’s name wasn’t actually on the shirt, only his wife’s). The class that won, though, had a headshot of one of their classmates surrounded by all of their names on a bright orange shirt. While it was certainly the most colorful shirt, it won solely on the merits of its presentation. They got their homeroom teacher, the new gym teacher, to skip down to the stage holding a giant Pooh bear also dressed in the shirt, where he then proceeded to put the Pooh on his head and spin in a circle singing a popular commercial jingle until he fell down. My theory is that he lost a bet.

After the shirt presentations, everyone got warmed up to start the actual sports events. The leader of the warm up was revealed as the curtains for the stage opened. He was holding a theatrical pose, one arm up in the air, the other hand on his hip… in a bright orange speed skater’s full bodysuit. Accompanied by a student playing a medley of soothing classical tunes that managed to fit the routine perfectly, he took everyone through the traditional Japanese sports warm up in high style. Everyone thought it was very funny, and the students warmed up with more enthusiasm than they did the day of the Long Walk, even though it was the same exercises.

The rest of the first day was dedicated to the preliminary elimination rounds of the main sporting events, basketball, volleyball, soccer, and table tennis. These were, of course, modified short matches so they could actually have all the classes compete in a timely fashion, and no student who played on that sport’s team as his or her club activity was allowed to participate in that particular activity, just to make it fair. 2-1 did pretty well in the preliminaries for all the events. I saw the girls’ team win a volleyball game and then a basketball game. I haven’t seen basketball quite like that since my brother was in the pee-wee league at 5 years old. Not a lot of skill involved, but at least they did manage to score twice, and that was all it took in a 20-minute mini-game. I didn’t see any of the soccer or table tennis, but Mukaiyama always has its sports day during the rainy season, so I’m sure the soccer players were quite a sight to behold. The playing field is only dirt, after all, not grass, so it turns into a nice big mud flat. Mr. Ogata, who sits next to me, said he didn’t get to see any of the soccer either, even though he’s the soccer coach, because he was assisting in the infirmary and was too busy. Nearly 50 students went through there to get taped or bandaged.

This morning was dedicated to the final rounds of the four main events. Apparently, one of the third year classes won both men’s and women’s soccer, so they must be really good. I don’t think 2-1 won any of the finals. After the basketball finals, the teachers challenged the winning boys’ team to a game, and were resoundingly beaten. Mr. Ogata reported that one student broke his leg playing soccer and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but that was the only severe injury.

The afternoon was dedicated to “fun games,” and that’s when I found out what all the kids had been practicing for by running up and down the hallways in all their free time for the past two days. This was, in my opinion, the most fun part of the whole two days. These were all the silly games. There was a scavenger hunt for things the audience had, like someone’s smelly shoe, a necklace, a PHS mobile phone, another class’s sports day shirt, 3 people with glasses, etc. There was also, of course, tug-of-war. There was team jump rope, with 10 people jumping. This involved a lot of variation as teams had tried to determine what the best configuration of people was, 10 strung out, or 5 pairs, all facing one direction or both, how long the rope should be, all for one minute of jumping. The key was to find your rhythm early, otherwise you’d never get very many jumps.

Then came the best events, the ones they’d all been practicing for. For two days there have been students running past the staff room with their hands on each others’ shoulders, saying “one, two, one, two.” It was for the 100-Leg race. 10 students in a row had their legs tied together with judo belts, forming a long centipede tethered at the ankles. They had to run down the length of the gym, take a turn around the person standing at the end as a marker, and get back to the starting point. 2-1 was one of the fastest classes, and had put some thought into it. They had chosen a group of all girls, to keep the height variation to a minimum, and they were all barefoot. They had also tied their tethers better than some groups, who had to keep stopping to retie them. None of them fell down either.

As if that wasn’t amusing enough, the next event was even better, in a totally bizarre way. The classes were divided by even-odd room numbers into two teams. Then each of the classes provided two teams of first girls, then boys later, to make a kind of horse and rider pyramid. 3 students formed the horse by having on student in front with their hands held back on either side to form part of the stirrups. Then there were two students behind that one who put their inside arms on the front person’s shoulders to make the seat, and their outside hands held the front person’s to make the other half of the stirrups. The rider was wearing either a red or white cloth hat, depending on which team they were on. The object was for the rider to first, protect his or her hat, and second, to grab as many of the opposing team’s hats as possible. It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. The worst part is that I didn’t get a picture, because I was out of film.

The last event was a relay race. This had to be held outside on the mud field. The teams that were serious about winning all had either bare feet or cleats to avoid slipping. I think the fastest class was the Kumas. They got a huge lead right from the beginning and never gave it up. All the teachers were very impressed. One of the third year boys serving as the last leg collapsed after he got across the finish line from hyperventilation and cramps. His entire class gathered around him and cheered for him until he could sit up, and then two of them helped him get up. They were going to carry him, but he said he wanted to walk. When he tried, though, even with his arm around one of his friends, his legs collapsed, so his friend just shifted him over into a piggyback and carried him across the field to the infirmary.

The day ended with the closing awards ceremony. 3-1 class, with the yellow frog t-shirts, won the grand prize, but 2-1 was in 4th place, which was still respectable. The gym teacher who had done the Pooh dance got a gag prize, and came out to claim it with Pooh strapped to his back and a huge gold bow tie bigger than his own head. The emcee ended up conducting most of the ceremony through a handheld loudspeaker because the microphone died, but he still managed to be extremely enthusiastic, as he had been for the whole two days.

2003-07-07T23:02:00.000-07:00

Brass Band
I met Danola on Saturday, ostensibly for lunch, but actually ended up going to see her high school’s brass band performance much later in the afternoon. I really wish I’d gotten to go to Mukaiyama’s now, since their band usually makes it to national competition, but they just had to perform the day I left for my vacation in May. Oh, well.

Anyway, Tagajo SHS might not be quite on par with Mukaiyama, but they were still very good. Kristel was with us, and said that compared to the junior high school performances she’s sat through, it was professional quality. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it was impressive. It was divided into two halves, the first half being what the band director had chosen to showcase their skills, and the second half being student-chosen, as well as student-conducted.

In the first half, the band was wearing their uniforms of black pants and green blazers, very Japanese high school. The interesting thing to me was how many of the members were girls. The boys were by far in the minority. The entire timpani section was female, and they were a lot of fun to watch. The second piece, which I didn’t like very much overall musically speaking, was very entertaining from the technical aspect. The percussionists got out bass bows and ran them up and down the sides of the xylophone keys and one of the cymbals, and the trumpet and trombone sections put down their instruments and played glasses of water at one point.

The second half, though, was where the students showed off their creativity. For the first several pieces, each successive row of the seating had on a different rainbow colored top, and the lighting was done with a rainbow theme as well. There were also some cheerleaders with pom-poms, American style, who ran onto the stage at various times. I’m not really sure why, but hey, it was entertaining. To give you an idea of what the students chose to play, there was a medley of spy theme songs, such as Mission: Impossible, as well as some more seriously musical numbers.

Then there was a break as some smaller groups, such as the flute ensemble, and three members of the sax section, among others, came out and did group solos (including the Beatles, of course). During that time, everyone else was changing clothes and then assembling in their places behind the starry curtain some of the erstwhile cheerleaders were holding up. When the main stage lights came back up, the band struck up a medley from Disney’s Aladdin, complete with band members acting out scenes. There were three thieves chasing Aladdin at first, (and he looked very embarrassed to not have on an actual shirt, just his little vest,) and then Jasmine appeared (who looked even more embarrassed about appearing in what amounted to a shiny blue bra and harem trousers; she kept trying to cover her stomach). When Aladdin and Jasmine finally eluded the thieves and the romance theme started, an actual magic carpet appeared… in the form of a cargo trolley draped with a carpet, being pushed inconspicuously by the former thieves. The audience thought it was great.

Then the starry night curtain was removed, Aladdin, Jasmine, and the thieves got to return to their instruments, and the rest of the band was revealed to all be wearing a motley collection of vaguely Disney-themed costumes. They ranged everywhere from Mickey and Minnie Mouse, to Peter Pan, to a sparkly Tinkerbell ball gown, to a boy in an Afro wig, to several female basketball punks. Most of the timpani section opted for a tropical theme to go with their maracas. The best part, in my opinion, was when the sparkly ball-gowned percussionist had to take the place of the person at the drum set from her more usual position with the bells and xylophones, and had to hike up her glittery, cloudy blue skirts to use all the foot pedals properly. They all looked like they had a great time, and the audience obviously loved it too.

Like all Japanese cultural performances, we were also given comment sheets and pencils. Danola got to vote for songs she wanted to hear next year. She rather dated herself by requesting Wham. Who knows, maybe they’ll take her request, given the way retro music tastes run here. She might have had more luck with David Bowie, though. Kristel and Danola both had quite a time navigating the lobby to get out, since many of the students Kristel had last year graduated and went on to Danola’s high school. I, on the other hand, was just another gaijin. Ah, conspicuous anonymity.

2003-07-07T01:34:00.000-07:00

Fourth of July
This was quite possibly the lamest 4th of July ever. It’s something like the fourth or fifth year that I haven’t gotten to go to Nags Head, which is what I’m traditionally supposed to do, or at the very least, go to a beach. This year, I wasn’t even on vacation. Not only did I spend the whole day at work, there were also no other Americans around at all, so no one would even recognize complaining as legitimate for the day. It was all terribly depressing. Rainy season in Japan was not meant for reminiscing about American summer holidays.

When I saw Kristel and Danola the next day, Kristel said that now that her parents have a house in Florida, she’s been in the US several times for the 4th and found it very surreal. When her parents first spent a summer there, they had no idea why everything seemed to shut down and no one was around to do anything. Now, they have enough American friends in the neighborhood that they get invited to cookouts and stuff, but before, they had no idea what was going on. That made me feel a bit better.

So, since I don’t have a good Japanese 4th of July story, I’ll tell you about my other foreign holiday adventure, from two years ago when I lived in Chile. That day happened to be the first day of our trip to Peru. The semester was over, it was “exam period,” which none of the professors actually used to give exams, and we were set to leave for the US in two weeks, so those of us on the program who didn’t decide to go home early (the weenies) decided to travel as much as we could.

Early in the morning, Jessica and I met up with some of the other gringas in our group of 8 and got on the plane in Santiago to fly to Arica, the northern-most city in Chile. It was winter in Chile, so when we left Santiago is was chilly and gray, but Arica is desert country, and it was bright, sunny, and warm when we got there. We spent the day wandering around town while waiting for the last two people in our group to get in on a later flight. The sky was brilliant blue, there were flowers blooming in the square outside the famous church designed by Eiffel, and then we walked over to the ocean. I took a “patriotic” picture of a statue of the liberator of Chile, Bernardo O’Higgins (Yes, O’Higgins. He was half-Irish. I’m not kidding.), on a horse, of course, in front of the big historic cliff that the Chilean army had to scale to recapture the land from Peru, with a Chilean flag at the top.

Later that afternoon, when everyone had gotten there, we took a taxi across the border, just 45 minutes, to Tacna, Peru, and from there set off on our Peruvian adventure. I want to go back to the Andes now. Sigh.

2003-07-02T03:06:00.000-07:00

Flying Solo
Yesterday I taught class all on my own, without a co-teacher. I didn’t mind that much, since it was a class I was supposed to teach with one of the more stressfully clueless teachers. When I came in by myself and announced that the other teacher wouldn’t be there, the students all applauded. What am I going to do next year when I’m not a celebrity anymore? I might actually be expected to teach my English classes at MSU based on something other than my exotic foreigner status. What a shock.

I was worried that I would have enough to do with them, but it turned out that we needed to finish 2 lessons, instead of just one, so that was no problem. I started out with a version of team “Telephone,” where they pass a sentence to the back of their row and the last person in each row has to write it on the board, the object being to get all 10 words correct and therefore keep all 10 of their points. It’s a successful game at both of my schools. Then we covered 2 lessons worth of material, with listening comprehension and pair work.

And I did everything in English. Everything. I did not speak any Japanese to the students at all, and they seemed to understand almost everything the first time. For the complicated instructions for the game, I asked for a volunteer from the class to translate, and that was it.

It’s kind of depressing to me to think about, actually. If these students had teachers who consistently spoke English to them in English class, they would be so much further ahead now. If more Japanese teachers would assume that their students could actually understand them and not baby them with simple sentences and immediate Japanese translation, they’d actually learn things! An amazing concept, I know. I suppose I should be glad that I’m getting all these valuable insights into what not to do when I’m responsible for teaching on my own. In the meantime, the Japanese schools are a long way from turning out fluent English speakers.

Why don’t people just ask me? The world would run a lot more smoothly.

2003-06-28T02:03:00.000-07:00

Invasion!
For the past two weeks, and presumably for another week or two to come, all the area high schools have been invaded. By student teachers. Apparently in Japan, when you are in your second year of university for a teaching degree, you have to go do your student teaching hours. But it’s not just by random assignment, as it seems in the US, not by any means. Everyone must return to the high school from which he or she graduated. This strikes me as very surreal, since the third year students are still kids the student teachers most likely went to school with, and the teachers they are being supervised by were their actual teachers. I think it would be hard to take yourself seriously as a teacher in those conditions.

I got to team-teach with one of these nervous young people on Friday. (Despite what the people at the movie theater thought, I felt very old to realize that this guy was younger than me. Before I came to Japan, I had to readjust my thinking when I realized that my dad’s interns at work were younger than me. It’s like when I realized that the characters in the books I had read all through my childhood and revered as cool, older people were actually now younger than the me that had just entered high school. So disorienting.) Said young man didn’t really get to do much, and was extremely quiet during the lesson planning session, so I wasn’t actually sure if he spoke English at all before we got into the classroom. His job was to be the other half of the tape recorder parts of the lesson, that being when we read the textbook dialogues out loud so the students could work on listening comprehension. His English was very clear, though, when he did actually speak out loud, so I think he was just extremely nervous and not wanting to offend Ms. Shiokai in any way.

The lesson was on asking for and giving directions, which is always notoriously difficult. However, we were teaching one of the more energetic classes, and they understood far more than I had feared. As we neared the end of class and came to the final activity, Ms. Shiokai discovered that she had left the handouts in the staff room, and quickly seized on the opportunity to give the student teacher directions on how to get back there and look for them. As he quickly left the room on his mission, one of the girls in the class said loudly “Kawaii sou!” (“How cute-looking!”), which I’m sure made him blush. When he came back, one of the other student teachers was wandering through the halls and stopped to watch him through the hallway-side windows, which also made him terribly self-conscious. It occurs to me that he was suddenly living the life I lead every day. Welcome to the fishbowl.

2003-06-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

Rainy Season Samurai
I don’t think anyone has more fun during the rainy season than little boys. What better excuse to carry an umbrella all the time? And when carrying a furled umbrella, what else would you do besides stage mock sword battles with your friends? I mean, obviously.

Today, I had the pleasure of walking home behind an entire aspiring kendo team. Six little elementary school boys, all armed with plastic umbrellas. One of them even flipped down the inner mesh part of his baseball cap to form a mock kendo helmet visor. (He also had his flannel shirt tied around his neck like a cape.) Because the battle would run ahead of me and then stop for skirmishes all along the side of the street, I ended up walking in the midst of it for a ways. When I came along side the kid with the visor, I said, “Kendo desu ka?” (lit. “Is it kendo?”), to which he proudly replied in the affirmative. Another of them hit me with the tip of his sword on the back swing and promptly gave me a “Gomen nassai!” but I just smiled and waved it off. It was kind of funny to me how they just seemed to accept me as part of the group while I was walking in the middle of them. I didn’t offer to fence any of them, though. It wouldn’t have been fair. My umbrella was much bigger.

2003-06-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

Early Release
This has been a good week for getting to go home early. On Monday, I got to leave work at noon because Minami was still having exams, and there was no reason for me to be there in the afternoon. There wasn’t really a reason to be there in the morning, either, but that was for appearance’s sake, since all the other teachers had to be there.

Miraculously, I had remembered to bring my camera with me that day, so instead of just walking home, I kept walking on the main road which leads to the big bridge over the river and into downtown. I stopped at the corner of the big road and my own street, in front of the Milky Way restaurant, to take pictures of the little shrine surrounded by a large plot of wildflowers. I walk past it every day on the way to Mukaiyama. It appears to be tended by the old women in the neighborhood, and just strikes me as a very odd little Japanese thing. Here, in the middle of Sendai, on the corner of a busy intersection in front of a “family restaurant,” there is a little community supported garden of haphazard ornamental flowers surrounding a shrine housing Buddhas dedicated to the protection of children and motorists. Beauty in the midst of ugly, everyday busy-ness. Typical.

Then I kept going towards the bridge instead of turning onto my street, and actually found the entrance to Atago-bashi Shrine. This is the shrine that is supposedly the major landmark of my neighborhood and how I tell people where I live, but I’d never been there. It’s on the tall hill that makes for my main view out my back window. For New Year’s, they strung lights all along the pathway up the stairs and around the periphery of the grounds, which was very pretty to see whenever I was walking home from downtown after dark. I’ve been meaning to go up there for months, but it was raining, or too hot, or I had to go do something else, or whatever.

But on Monday I finally had the time, the energy, and it wasn’t too hot to move more than absolutely necessary. The entrance is off a small road leading up into the hilly residential area on my side of the river, just after a person comes off the bridge from downtown. The embankment is painted bright yellow with advertisements, so the Shinto torii gate above it has always struck me as incongruous.

The walk up to the actual shrine complex was actually prettier than the shrine, in my opinion, and this seems to be the usual way of Shinto shrines. They are often at the top of a hill or mountain, especially here in Miyagi, and the natural stone stairs leading to them are overhung with tall, shady trees. The bottom of the stairs at Atago-bashi are marked by a red gate followed by 3 flights of concrete steps, but as one climbs about halfway up, the natural stone steps start and lead up to a larger, unpainted wooden gate. At the top, there was a complex of 4 or 5 buildings, at least 3 of which seemed to be shrines of various sizes. There was a gazebo over to one side, where a man was sitting by himself looking out at Sendai and the river below him. The views as I wandered along the edge of the path were quite something. There was a tiny miniature shrine, about the size of a dollhouse, next to the gazebo with little ceramic cats covering its front steps. I kept following the path around in a circle, and on the other side of the buildings, I found another set of steps leading down to the neighborhood I walk through to get to Mukaiyama. There was also a gazebo roof set over a circle of Buddhas in different guises to accept people’s prayers for various problems. My favorite was the Buddha sitting on an elephant’s back. Someone had tied two rainbow senbazuru chains to the railing in front of it.

On the way back down the stairs, I stopped and took a couple of "Hey, I can see my house from here!" pictures. It'll be interesting to see how those turn out. Mostly, I can spot my house by finding the house next door, with all the plants on the roof, or tracing back from the little bridge at the end of my street. I'm trying to take pictures of the everyday things I see all the time in Sendai now, so I can show them to people later, and give them some idea of the flashback images I'll keep seeing in my mind all the time, like I do with images of Santiago de Chile now.

Today, I got out of school at noon because it was Mukaiyama’s Foundation Day, so none of the students had to come, and most of the teachers took vacation days so they didn’t have to come either. The only students walking to school with me today were the soccer team members, and because it was raining, they had to train in the gym, according to Mr. Ogata, who is their club supervisor/coach. Nothing very exciting happened, but Kamiyama-sensei offered to take me for soba, of course, and we ended up taking Nagane-sensei as well. Mr. Nagane just got married last month, and last night was the party for the staff to meet his wife. I turned down my invitation, since it seemed like mostly a drinking thing, as well as an opportunity to good-naturedly embarrass the poor, shy man, but it seems like the rest of them had a good time.

Baby Face
On a sort of related topic, I got out of work early on Friday, too, because of exams, and later that afternoon I met Danola downtown to finally go see Matrix: Reloaded. It was my second time to see it, yes, but she hadn’t seen it at all yet, which just would not do. Since it wasn’t Tuesday, which is Ladies’ Day, I figured I’d just have to pay the regular full price for the ticket, and that was fine. Such are the sacrifices one makes to see a movie in Japan. But when I got to the counter and handed over my ¥2000, the guy looked all surprised and said (in Japanese, translated for your convenience), “Aren’t you a student?” Well, sure, of course I am! But I pointed out that I didn’t have my student ID, and another counter guy leaned over, pointed at my driver’s license, and said, “Isn’t that it?” Who was I to argue with people who so wanted to sell me a movie ticket for half its regular price? There are advantages to looking very young.

When I related this to Mark, he said that his landlord saw a picture of me and thought I was about 15. When Mark corrected him, saying that I’m actually older than him, his landlord looked extremely startled and asked how old Mark was. Mark replied that he was 22, and his landlord said he thought Mark was about 28. Which makes one wonder why on earth he thought Mark was dating a 15-year-old. I thought it was funny.

2003-06-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

Free Writing
On Wednesday, I finished grading all 240 1st-year listening comprehension exams. I thought I was done grading. But on Thursday, the 2nd-year students took their English writing exam, and I was given another 240 examples of "free writing" to grade on the basis of number of words (40 or more), overall grammar, and interest of content. In case you were wondering, if they wrote 40 words, they got full marks for interest, since I thought that was kind of mean to grade them on, especially on a timed exam. They had a choice of 3 topics: Mukaiyama High School, My Boy/Girlfriend, or *ahem* Dana-sensei.

Now, for your enjoyment, I present some of the funnier, and impressive, efforts.

Mukaiyama High School
I entered Mukaiyama High School about a year ago. Then, I pictured my wonderful school life. But, in fact, I don't spend wonderful school life now. My parents say to me, "Study. Study." The word makes me tired. I don't want them to say the word. But I realize that I have to study.

My school is Mukaiyama High School. It is in the mountain, but the mountain’s name is not Mukaiyama but Yagiyama or Dainenzisan. Why we call it Mukaiyama? I don’t know it. Please tell me the reason. I like my school very much.

Mukaiyama High School is very fun. The club I belong to makes me happy, but Mukaiyama High School is far from my house. Sometime I don't want to go to school. In fact, I didn't go to Mukaiyama High School many time. I'm sorry.

My Girlfriend
I have a girlfriend. I love her. Maybe she loves me. She is as tall as me, so I want to be taller. She often write to me. I like her letter. I’m always looking forward to her letter. But I don’t write to her, because it is difficult to understand my mind and heart. I can’t understand my heart. And she said she couldn’t understand her heart. But she can understand my heart! How wonderful it is!

I have no girlfriend. But I need girlfriend. Because I am so fool that I can't live myself. I should find my girlfriend for survival. But I'm not loved by woman. I think that it is sad. I want to find girlfriend early.

My Girlfriend Hanako is so sexy and cute. She lives in Okinawa, and she has two brothers and three sisters. She has a white cat named P-chan. It is very interesting face, but I don't like it. I feel she is most pretty girl all over the world. But, in fact, I don't have Girlfriend. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry! I want to have a Girlfriend someday.

My Boyfriend
I don’t have boyfriend. I think my beautiful boy is coming soon. I have thought it for two years. I’m not dreamer. But I want to love, and give love. If there is love, have not money or can not meet always I’m OK. When I made sad, I want not to see hoyfriend, to hear his voice. Maybe I will be happy, only thinking about him. I’m praying the star every night. “I forward to see my boyfriend soon.”

My boyfriend is Hideki Matsui. He is a big star in Japan and the States. He is a member of baseball team in New York. We used to go to a baseball game together very often but we can't go there now. Because he is very busy and popular. I want to meet him more.

Dana-sensei Awwww. Please note original spelling and Capitalization.
I don't talk with her, so I don't know about her. But I think I talk to her someday. If I talk with her, I want to hear about America. Because I am interested in America and want to go there. And I think she is beauty.

We have never seen Dana-sensei!! Because Mr. Dana's class have not come yet. We look forward to talking with him. Please come here! Please! I don't know even man or woman. I need him and love him!

Dana-sensei always walks to Mukaiyama High School every morning. I often saw her walking. If someone say, “Good morning, Dana-sensei!” she answers with smile, “Good morning!” I would like to speak to her, but I cannot because I don’t have a chance to speak to her. Lately I am almost late for school every morning, so I don’t see her.

Ms. Dana is in Mukaiyama High School. She is ALT. I often see her while I go to school. She always walks to school. She can walk fast. Her class is very fun. But her class is seldom. I would like to talk with her a lot. I'm interesting abroad and want to study English. Therefore, I should talk with her.

Dana-sensei is very cute. I like her very much. But I have never talked with her. I would like to talk with her. I would like to know about her country, her family and her Boyfriend. I will try to talk to her.

Dana-sensei is teacher in Mukaiyama High School. Dana-sensei comes to my class every week. Dana-sensei looks tall. I think that Dana-sensei is taller than both Kamiyama-sensei and Kasahara-sensei. Dana-sensei is beautiful woman. I think that Dana-sensei is most beautiful in my school teacher.

Dana-sensei is my English teacher. She is speak Japanese very well. When I bring my leport, she checked very well. I like Dana-sensei. I want to speak with her in English. So I want to speak English well.

Dana-sensei is so cute. I like other countries people. I always think “If I can speak English…” Because I want to make a friend with many kind of people. Maybe. If I can speak English well, I can talk to Dana-sensei well. I can’t talk with Dana-sensei but, I often meet her. I said, “Hello Dana-sensei. How are you?” She said “I’m fine and you?” It makes me happy. Someday, I hope to talk with her only English.

2003-06-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

In Season
My landlady has become a Japanese welcome-wagon superwoman! I was sitting here this afternoon, about to get ready to go fetch my CDs from Richard, who had absconded with them for weeks, and I heard her calling me from the street. She was standing outside my front window, motioning for me to come over to their office. I got all my stuff, thinking I would just be over there for tea and then continue on from there, and went over.

Turns out, it’s the height of the season for those giant mutant lima beans, and she had a whole bunch she wanted to give me. They don’t grow like lima beans, but instead are what is inside the big pods I’ve been seeing at all the little grocery stores. I had thought they were giant okra or something. This led to a discussion of Japanese foods that I have and have not tried. I also got some young soy bean pods to make edamame myself, very fresh, since I pulled them off the stalks myself. When I confessed that I wasn’t sure what konyaku was, ignorance would not do, so she took me down to the little grocery store at the end of the street and showed me. She also bought me some tofu balls, instructed me to prepare them with grated bonito fish and soy sauce, and then gave me a packet of bonito. So I don’t need to worry about going to the grocery store for a while.

Eventually, I did get to Richard’s, and my feeling of my life in Japan coming full circle has been even more cemented now. We ended up going to a small neighborhood temple festival, you see, just like we did way back in the first week after we got here. This one didn’t involve dancing, though it did still have all the fair booths set up. We dined on yakisoba and chocolate-dipped strawberries on sticks. Richard also got the more traditional chocolate banana on a stick, which we thought were just hilarious when we got here. This festival’s main attraction seemed to be a large neighborhood bingo game, with potted plants and tubs of miso, among other things, as door prizes. There was a long line of people going up into the little temple to take off their shoes and then claim their prize. Richard found some of his old-lady friends who have adopted him, and was presented with sliced melon (which is really expensive in Japan) and a pair of, I kid you not, dress shoes. He wasn’t really sure how to react to the shoes. We sat on the curb of a little parking lot for nearly an hour, watching all the neighborhood people wander through the booths and occasionally talking to the elementary school kids who were daring each other to say something to us.

2003-06-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

Knock, Knock
Last night, just as I was sitting down to eat dinner, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find my landlady, bearing gifts. She had brought me a dinner of homemade sushi and fresh vegetables. The sushi was wrapped in two leaf-packets tied with twine, and she had made it all herself. She tried to describe what was in it and said, “No fish, no fish.” What she meant was that it contained no raw sashimi fish, but I still thought it was funny when I opened the leaves and found one whole sardine staring up at me from the top of each bed of rice. I removed the poor little sardines and enjoyed the rest of it, which was rice, ginger, some seaweed based stuff, a mushroom, and some other stuff I didn’t recognize. The vegetables were homemade edamame, the steamed and salted soy bean pods that are so good; some huge mutant lima bean things, except they tasted better; and some corn on the cob. Mmmmm, so good. I want a Japanese mom. Or a housewife. Or a girlfriend. Some Japanese woman to cook for me.

And as if that wasn’t enough to make my night, a little while later there was another knock at the door. This time it was yet another man trying to sell me a Japanese newspaper, and I discovered I had the perfect excuse to not get one: I’m leaving next month. So it actually turned out to be a rather pleasant little conversation about how good my Japanese was and no, I’m not tired of Japan, I’m just going home to go back to school. That’s one of the best spontaneous Japanese conversations I’ve ever had, and the most pleasant way I’ve ever gotten a solicitor to leave.

2003-06-18T00:57:00.000-07:00

Hybrid
I got to ride in Mr. Ogata’s hybrid car today! It’s a Toyota Prius, and it’s terribly cool. Mr. Kamiyama and I went out to lunch with Mr. Ogata, pretty much just because Mr. Kamiyama wanted to check out his car. Well, sort of. It had always been the plan to invite him to lunch, too, but there were ulterior motives for suggesting we take his car.

There’s a little TV built into the dashboard, and when we got in, it was displaying a little moving diagram, illustrating how the motor, engine, battery, and wheels were interacting. Since a everything from Mukaiyama is downhill, for a good 10 minutes or so, the engine wasn’t even running at all. Mr. Kamiyama and I were fascinated by watching the little arrows shift around to point at all the different energy relays as the car came to a stop or started moving again, went up or down a hill.

Then Mr. Ogata demonstrated the 5 CD changer, which of course will also display on the little screen. The musical selection for this afternoon was The Eagles. Apparently the ALT before Chaney always sang “Hotel California” when the teachers went to karaoke. The song became a huge hit in Japan when Mr. Kamiyama was in junior high, and he recalls two other students playing that song during the school festival. There was much reminiscing in the car, as well as singing under the breath.

But wait! That was not the end of the wonders displayed upon the little screen. Another feature was a series of bar graphs that will show you the gas mileage per 5-minute increment. I don’t think I should get a Prius. I’d spend too much time being fascinated by all the things that screen can display. It can also be a regular TV, which I see a lot of people in Japan watching in their cars while waiting at stoplights in the morning rush hour.

On the way back to school, I was sitting on the other side of the backseat, and I could see that there was a cell phone holder built into the dash as well. And there was of course an MD player as well as CD changer. Japanese cars are nifty.

There’s a new version of the Prius coming out for 2004, which is more aerodynamic (although I think the original Japanese styling is cute) and has more space in the backseat, since they discovered when they sent the Prius to the US that there wasn’t enough room for big ol’ Americans. It’s really expensive, though, and Mr. Ogata pointed out that when they announced the new one, the price of the old version went way down, which is how he could afford his.

Etc.
While at lunch, I learned that while shellfish and shrimp allergies are almost unheard of in Japan, an allergy to soba wheat is more common. A person with a soba allergy might even avoid eating udon, for fear that the noodles had been boiled in the same water as soba noodles. Boy am I glad I don’t have that allergy.

I graded 240 exams in the past two days, and nearly did in my official red teacher pen. I was only grading the listening portion, and my favorite answers were given for the question, “Where did Sarah go to junior high school?” The correct answer is Seattle. Answers I got included Shiateru, Siatoru, Shiatre, Ciatle, Singapole, Yokohama, Yellow, and “From my aunt’s house in Japan.”

On my way home, two little boys about the age of 8 were biking up the hill behind the swimming school towards me. The first one looked surprised and said, “Ah, gaikokujin da!” and smiled back when I grinned at him. The second one gave me a thumbs up and said loudly, in a clear voice, “Nice to meet you!” I did my English teacher duty by replying, “Nice to meet you, too.” Little kids are great.

2003-06-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

Summertime
I do not understand the weather in Japan. Yesterday, it was fall. Today, it is summer. Except it’s not really summer, it’s the fifth season, that being “rainy.” But it’s not raining. I finally decided, though, that the weather was not going to snap back to cold enough to use my heater, like I was last week, even though it is June. This morning, I got up and took the futon cover off the kotatsu, took up the pad-blanket to keep the heat from escaping through the floor, and got out the fan. So now it’s really summer, and the weather isn’t allowed to change its mind again.

When I was hanging the futon out the back window to air, I noticed that there was a little old man sitting up on the top of his backyard fence, pruning his little pine tree by hand. That made me smile. I also would like to proudly report that I did not drop the futon off the railing down into the inaccessible tangle of weeds behind my building. Every time I hang something out, I live in fear. I find it very annoying that my apartment does not have a proper balcony to hang things on, like all Japanese apartments are supposed to.

Other signs of summer are that it is now very hot walking to Mukaiyama, the water coming out of my kitchen tap is now warm rather than cold, I can actually turn down the heating element on my shower enough to get proper water pressure at the same time, and there is very little for me to do at work, because they’re all preparing for exams again, which is also why I haven’t had much interesting to say since my substitute weekend adventures. Hard to believe that my year in Japan has come almost full circle.

2003-06-11T05:41:00.000-07:00

Tofu
My conception of time is so screwed up right now. Today felt like Monday, so yesterday felt like Sunday, except it’s actually Wednesday, so yesterday was Tuesday. Got that? Right. Having a substitute weekend and then a 3-day week is very weird.

So anyway, yesterday, which was Tuesday, was very interesting. Originally, I was supposed to go see Reloaded with Danola, (yes, again, don’t look at me like that,) but she cancelled that on Monday night, so I thought Tuesday was going to be rather empty. But in the morning, I had a message to call Danola back, and she said that her tutor, Mika, had coupons for a professional massage that afternoon, so would I like to go?

Ahem. Would I like to go? I’m no fool. Of course I wanted to go! For those of you who have ever heard me complain about my shoulders, or attempted to attack those rock-hard bits of muscle that hold my arms to the rest of my body, well, you can just start feeling sympathy right now for the poor masseuse. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I met Danola and Mika at the statue in the station around 1:15. Mika said she had a restaurant she wanted to take us to for lunch first, which was near the Disney store (a major downtown landmark). The way I normally walk, this would have taken maybe 10 minutes. Walking with Danola and Mika, who works 6 days a week and is a notorious window-shopper on her day off, it took about an hour. All we had to do was walk down the two covered-street shopping arcades, but this did not at all follow a straight path. We went to the drugstore for sunblock for Danola; we stopped at 3 shoe stores to look at sandals; we nearly had to take print-club pictures before dragging Mika away from the game arcade entrance; and finally, we convinced her that Danola really didn’t need to look at the Pooh-san merchandise in the Disney store because the restaurant was right there. (Mika really likes to spoil Danola as her “Japanese big sister.”) Whew, made it.

The restaurant we went to was really nice. It was a tofu restaurant, in very traditional Japanese style. We took off our shoes when we entered, and followed the kimonoed waitress to a tiny private room, entered through a half-sized door so you had to kneel to go through. The table had space for our legs recessed into the floor, so the table was still basically at floor height. The waitresses did everything kneeling on the tatami beside the table.

The room was very pretty, with a bamboo theme. Mika told us that each room in the restaurant had a different theme, coordinated with the kind of pottery that was used for the tea service. The napkins, the placemats, the chopsticks, everything had coordinated flowers embossed or printed on them. To our amusement, Mika also insisted later that we visit the bathroom to round out our experience, because the toilet paper was printed with plum blossoms. I might also add here that the sinks were also gorgeous pottery basins, each done with a different pattern, so it was indeed a worthwhile trip for more than just the toilet paper.

When I say this was a tofu restaurant, I mean it. Everything they served was made of tofu. Mika got us all the set menu, which she said was made up of many small dishes, so we wouldn’t be too full. I don’t know what her definition of full is, but I was stuffed by the end. There were about 7 courses, each displaying a vastly different method of preparing tofu from the last. There was tofu stretched kind of like pasta; there was tofu made into a sort of vegetable custard; tofu curds; tofu fried, accompanied by a slice of lemon in its own squeezing device; tofu stuffed with vegetables, then fried and boiled; tofu blocks floating in a basket with soup, heated in the middle of the table, then ladled artfully by Mika into the appropriate individual bowls with a fish-paste-cake flower and a snow pea. All these things (of which I might have actually left out something) were followed by rice, tofu (as opposed to miso) soup, and roasted tea. We could also have had tofu ice cream or some other kind of sweet, but Danola and I protested that we couldn’t eat any more. And according to the menu, the entire set only had about 700 calories. Mmmm, Japan.

Mika insisted that she was treating us, since she leaves for Australia next month to get married to her fiancé, Paul. Standing at the counter, waiting for her change and our shoes, Danola and I idly noticed that they had some interesting keitai straps with cloth work flowers and beads. Then our shoes were brought out, so we went to put them on while Mika got her change. When she came out to put her own shoes on, she had bought us both straps. “It’s very Japanese,” was her reason. No wonder this woman works in customer service. She’s a one-woman tourism board.

By this point, it was past 3 in the afternoon, and we still hadn’t made it to the massage place, which was of course back on the other side of Sendai Station. We re-entered the gauntlet of stores. We passed a department store and had to go into the lingerie section, and then downstairs below that to another one, which was, improbably, playing Randy Travis over the PA. Nothing was bought on these little side trips, but Danola and I did get in a few nicely sarcastic observations about the unique styles and colors of Japanese women’s under-apparel.

(Let me insert a side-note here: I do not think that it would ever occur to me that taking my boyfriend to an underwear store would be a good date activity. I seriously wonder what was going through that poor man’s mind. Or maybe it’s better for me not to wonder…)

Then it was across the street to the upscale department store, Fujisaki, because Mika’s mother had requested that Mika buy her a “romantic” apron. With lace and ruffles, you know. I know from personal experience that Fujisaki is totally over-priced, and indeed, aprons in their kitchen department were as much as $70. And they didn’t have anything romantic enough, anyway.

We stopped at shoe stores again on the way back toward the station, but didn’t find any adequate sandals, the ¥100 Store for a wind chime, and then this ridiculous store that sells everything you’d ever need to be a housewife in Japan, down to and including the little foil cups to put in your family’s bento boxes to keep the pickles separate from the rice. And, of course, lots and lots of aprons. Aprons with lace, aprons with ruffles, aprons with flowers and denim, pockets and buttons and ties, sleeves or no sleeves. What Mika settled on was indeed “romantic,” if you define romantic as diaphanous, pink flower print, with many, many ruffles and totally, utterly impractical. She said she was embarrassed by her mother's taste, much to our amusement.

After the apron, though, we took the underground subway passage to get to the other side of the station, so Mika would not look at any more shops. This actually managed to get us to the massage place, a mere 3 hours after we had set out for lunch.

The massage place does therapeutic massage and reflexology, or so we were told by the nice English-speaking woman who got us to fill out forms to indicate where we wanted our “doctors” to concentrate their efforts. Danola said she had no preference, and it seemed like she spent most of her time talking to her masseuse in Japanese-English anyway. He was quite the charming young man. I, on the other hand, confidently circled the shoulder portion of the diagram, and my poor masseuse kept asking repeatedly if he was pressing too hard. My only reply was no, no, that was just fine… I can now add Japanese to the list of ways I’ve been told that my shoulders are really stiff. The twenty-five minutes seemed to fly.

Afterward, they served us chamomile tea in the waiting area. Because it was our first visit, Danola and I only had to pay ¥1000. They gave us vouchers for the same deal to give to our friends, and we left with much profuse thanks. My shoulders are still grateful. Danola is going to be very sad when Mika leaves.

2003-06-09T01:34:00.000-07:00

Sports Meet
Let’s hear it for compensatory days off! I finally get my weekend now. I had to “work” on Saturday and Sunday, you see, meaning I had to attend Mukaiyama sporting events. This weekend was the all-Miyagi high school sports meet. All high schools in the prefecture, competing in all sports for the finals, in two days.

My original thought had been to try to go see interesting Japanese things, like kendo and kyudo, perhaps judo, but those events were all being held far outside of Sendai. Instead, my presence was requested at (meaning, assigned to) badminton on Saturday and basketball on Sunday. I’m a North Carolina heretic for saying this (at least about basketball), but I’m not really a fan of either of these sports, so I was not just jumping with excitement, especially when it meant I had to get up early on a weekend.

On Saturday, I arose and made my way by subway to the southern Tomizawa terminal stop, located “in front” of the Sendai-shi Taikukan (Sendai City Gymnasium). Fortunately, it’s really only a five-minute walk away, and I just followed the high school students to find it. Miraculously, I chose the right entrance to the bleachers the first time, and found the other Mukaiyama people right away.

These are the things I learned about badminton: It is very hard. It takes a very long time. There are 5 sets to a full match, 2 doubles and 3 singles. Each must play to 15 points. Players get very tired during this time. They can ask for a time-out to wipe sweat off their racket, hands, and face. Also, it is a fairly popular sport at Mukaiyama, so there was a fair group of dedicated student fans there for the whole day, in addition to the students from non-sport clubs who were assigned to come and turn in their attendance sheet.

Many of the other schools had large banners, senbazuru (chains of 1000 paper cranes for good luck and health), and cheering sections. (I couldn’t see our banner, if we had one, because I was sitting behind it.) Kamiyama-sensei and I spent some time analyzing the English on the banners and trying to figure out what the rule is for a sport having “games,” “matches,” or “meets.” After Mukaiyama’s boys’ team lost their match, we left and went to have lunch, so I was back home fairly early in the afternoon.

On Sunday, I had to really be up early, because Kamiyama-sensei was coming to pick me up for the basketball tournament. It was being held in the Composite Sports Garden (don’t ask) in Rifu, which is the complex including the stadium Sendai built to host its World Cup games. It truly is huge, as is its running costs, which is sort of a sore subject with teachers in Miyagi, since they’re all taking a pay cut this year, due to budgetary shortfalls.

Our boys’ basketball team is pretty good, so they had made it to the Sunday stage, but the girls’ were kind of iffy, and when we got there we found out that they hadn’t made it. This meant that we had nothing Mukaiyama-related to do for two and a half hours after arriving. I spent my time mostly people-watching. Because there were lots of students there from other schools, there were lots of girls in uniforms. This is a novelty for Mukaiyama boys, since we have no uniforms at our school. As I mentioned, the weather has gotten warmer, and skirts have gotten shorter of late, so I was very amused to watch several members of our basketball team tracking girls as they walked by.

The biggest excitement was when the oendan club from Sendai Ni-ko SHS arrived. Ni-ko is an all-boys high school, and they have one of the top basketball teams in the prefecture, often going on to the regional and occasionally national competitions. Their oendan captains wear flashy all-white uniforms, rather than the traditional black, and they brought their own taiko drum as well. I found out that the reason the drummer’s uniform is always cut up or torn is because that uniform is handed down every year, each time a little more personalized, to show the length of tradition at the school. The Ni-ko uniform is has nearly no sleeves at all, is frayed, cropped, and embroidered, all very impressive. The school is over 100 years old, but I assume the jacket is a bit younger than that. They had quite the cheering section organized for their game, which of course Ni-ko won. At least the opposing team wasn’t totally trounced, the way the girls at the next court were, (133-25).

Finally, it was time for Mukaiyama to play. We ended up playing Shobo, which is a commercial high school and a bit more focused on sports than Mukaiyama, the high level math and science school that it is. Reminds me of my own high school days. Mukaiyama’s team did a fairly good job of holding their own, but they were no match for the three-point prowess of several of the Shobo players, nor the fact that Shobo always got the rebound. We did have a healthy cheering section, though, headed by one of the underclassmen on the team with a horn. It took me a while to realize that they were chanting “Defense” and “My ball!” It was a fairly exciting game, and we only lost by about 8 points, but when it was over, I was ready to go, since I hadn’t had any breakfast on account of Kamiyama-sensei coming about 20 minutes early, and it was by that point 2:00. As he said, it had been a long day.

So that was the sports weekend. I saw no real evidence of romance or flirting, despite rumors to that effect. There was some very purposeful rearrangement of some girls in the gallery watching the basketball game, so maybe it was to give preference to people with boyfriends, but I have no hard evidence for that hypothesis. It was interesting to see the students outside of school, see who was good friends with who and how they interacted, but it also made me feel kind of lonely. I made up for it by coming home and talking to all of my friends on-line. I live such a technological life right now.

2003-06-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

All Work and No Play…
…turn Dana into a total langauge nerd. I grant you that this is not far different from my normal state, but I would like to pretend that this kind of thing would not happen if I didn’t spend all day at work correcting English compositions and answering questions about bizarre usage rules. I may just be deluding myself though.

I’ve finally managed to pick up an actual Japanese radio station, you see. And just a few minutes ago, while innocently hanging up my laundry, I noticed that the song playing was a Japanese hip-hop song, mostly in English. Very good English, actually, by hip-hop standards, and amazingly blending the Japanese parts with the English parts without just using random words taken out of context. And then the chorus came, and what did I realize? It was a simple, straightforward run-through of the present tense verb conjugations of “like” and “love,” from first person to third person plural:

I like it / he likes it / she likes it / we like it / they like it;
I love it / he loves it / she loves it / we love it / they love it
-from Crystal Kay’s “I Like It”

2003-06-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

Earthquake Drill
Today’s excitement at school was an earthquake drill in the afternoon. I am informed that this one was taken a little more seriously than usual due to the actual earthquake last week, but here follows the report of how it went.

The siren sounded briefly, someone announced the drill on the PA, and then Mr. Ogata, the awesome English-speaking teacher who sits next to me, said “Time to man the battle stations.” (He’s a big Star Trek fan. I like sitting next to him.) When the earthquake siren sounds, the emergency doors swing out of the walls and shut off the wide open stairwells, leaving only a push-open emergency door. I’m not really sure why; maybe it protects people in the regular parts of the building if the stairway collapses or something. We then went to the front entranceway, changed our shoes, and wandered out to the sports field. When I asked if people would stop to change their shoes during a real earthquake, the response was, “Oh, absolutely not!,” which is relieving.

We then stood around on the sports field, or rather, the students sat in orderly lines on the sports field and the teachers stood, while the vice-principal gave a thrilling speech giving the history of major earthquakes in Japan. I’m told that the drill is usually held on June 12, as a memorial for the last big earthquake in Miyagi, which killed some people in the Yagiyama area of Sendai, which is where Mukaiyama SHS is.

Many of the teachers asked me if we have earthquake drills in the US. I once again astonished them by reporting that NC doesn’t have earthquakes. I then got to explain all about tornado drills, which they were very interested in. I decided not to tell them about the time the principal at our elementary school forgot to tell us the drill was over, and our teachers made us stay in the crouch position in the cafeteria for half an hour.

2003-06-03T23:59:00.000-07:00

In the news
Here are some interesting tidbits from Japanese news that I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard in the US (or wherever you live):

Last week, the emperor got out in the imperial gardens and personally planted the rice shoots that he had seeded a month or so before. He did this “in a light rain” and this rice will be harvested in the fall for use in various rituals that call for rice throughout the year. Nice to know he’s doing his part to keep the world turning.

At the beginning of this week, students switched from winter to summer school uniforms. “This change traditionally happens at the beginning of June,” as, indeed, it did. This means the switch from dark blue to white sailor uniforms for junior high girls, from blazers to no blazers for many senior high boys, and from long sleeved button-down shirts to short sleeves for most students in general. Also, high school girls are back to rolling their skirts as high as they can get away with.

A rose that was taken into space 5 years ago by a Japanese astronaut is in bloom again. When it came back to earth, the government of the town where the astronaut was from took over its care, and held a little press conference for it yesterday. It is a pinkish-red. It was used for an experiment on fragrances.

2003-06-03T01:39:00.000-07:00

Pep Rally
This coming weekend is the prefectural sports meet. All the high schools in Miyagi, for all sports, from Saturday through half of Monday. This means I get to “work” all weekend, so I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about the actual events after this weekend. Today, though, we had a pep rally at school to encourage all the sports teams who made it into the finals. Sports in Japanese high schools, by the way, do not have seasons, so kids on one team are only on that one team and play no other sports for the school. They practice all year round.

The pep rally was led by the Japanese cheerleading squad. I was given a brief history lesson by Mr. Ogata, who said that this style of cheerleading started during the Meiji era in the universities. Since universities only allowed men to study, cheerleading was an all-male thing as well. The idea that cheerleading in the US is done by predominantly girls in short skirts strikes them all as very funny. The boys on the cheerleading squad get kind of embarrassed about the comparison. They struggle a lot to find some other name for it in English. In Japanese it is oendan, as I learned from one of the student essays I corrected earlier today.

At Mukaiyama, being the progressive institution it is, cheerleading is done by both males and females now. Not that you can really tell, considering that they all wear black military-style uniforms, with stand up collars and gold buttons down the front, and long trailing headbands of varying colors. I think the colors might have something to do with their roles in the club. The boy who was playing the role of master of ceremony was in charge of yelling the next participant’s name and playing the taiko drum. He had cut slits in the sleeves of his suit jacket so they fell back off his arms when he beat the drum. The head cheerleader was wearing a longer jacket, down to his knees, and a purple headband. He performed the traditional cheer, which involves standing in front of the audience, unfurling a scroll, and then screaming the cheer written on it in kanji, pulling the scroll past his body as he read it.

After a speech by the principal, each team came to the front and asked the rest of the students to please come and support them at whichever venue they will be competing. The teams competing for Mukaiyama are basketball (men’s and women’s), table tennis, soft tennis, badminton, softball, swimming, kendo, kyudo, judo, volleyball (men’s and women’s, all of whom have the most muscular legs I’ve ever seen), and, if I’m not mistaken, rhythmic gymnastics. There are so many soccer teams in Miyagi that their portion of the tournament started last month, and Mukaiyama did make it, but they lost just this past Sunday, so they won’t still be playing this weekend, and so unfortunately didn’t get to be part of the pep rally. From another student essay, I found out that the third year players on the soccer team had all threatened to quit if they didn’t make it into the prefectural tournament, so the younger members felt a bit stressed last month.

After all the teams were done addressing the audience, the cheerleaders came back out and performed some dances to drumming. I didn’t get to see the first one because there were students in the way, but it was the one accompanied by the traditional yelling cheers, which consist of basically “OOOOHHHHH… OOOOHHHH… MU…KAI…YA… MA!!!” (As the daughter of a speech pathologist, my first thought was, “This is really bad for their vocal folds. That must hurt.”) Judging by the second dance, they also involve a lot of large arm motions and jumping back and forth with legs kicking out to the sides. That’s a really awful description, but I’m not really sure how else to put it. The school flag was also waved around over the heads of the dancers.

Then all the sports teams were filed out and the pep rally was over. The cheering will happen again for the opening ceremony of the sports days. I feel psyched, don’t you?

International Communication
Yesterday at Minami, the International Communication Club asked me to come and talk to them again. Last time I went, they tried to be kind of organized and academic, with a textbook and all, but this time they seem to have given up on that. It’s a very small club, only 3-4 girls, and I was informed by the leader, when we all sat down, that the topic for the day was going to be one of the other girls’ love life. Said other girl turned very red and said, “No, no, no.” But her protests were to no avail, and we found out that she and this boy she knows from elementary and junior high school are not dating, they are just friends. Also, her “old boyfriend” had played golf with her on Saturday. Given that he’s 48 years old, I assume he’s a family friend. She said she was very sad because he was married. The conversation then turned back on the group leader, who revealed that she has a crush on a boy from Higashi SHS, and has plans to go see the circus with him and a group of friends later this month. She cannot, however, go watch him during the sports tournament this weekend because she has to stay at school and take the phoned-in results for each event for the school newspaper. The third girl insisted that there was no one that she liked as a boyfriend, but also indicated that there was perhaps a specific person she was going to go watch play handball. So perhaps this whole sports thing will be a hotbed of romance as well as sporting glory.

2003-06-02T03:46:00.000-07:00

Rainy Weekend Fun
This weekend, Jamin came up to Sendai from Tokyo and Dayle came down from Iwate, and we had a little Beloit summer school reunion. It’s been nearly a year since we went to Beloit for the summer Japanese program in preparation for coming to Japan. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long. Jamin is pretty much done with his internship at the architecture firm in Tokyo, so he’s using his last month or so in Japan to travel around seeing all the stuff that he didn’t get to see during the days when he was working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Dayle, on the other hand, has settled into her life in Iwate-machi a lot more now, and seems ready to enjoy her second year in rural Japan.

Unfortunately, they didn’t get to see Matsushima (one of the three most beautiful places in Japan!) because it was raining all weekend. It was lovely weather on Friday, and sunny again today, but Saturday and Sunday it pretty much rained non-stop. Poor us, we had no choice but to stay inside and eat. I certainly didn’t object, since Dayle happily put herself in charge of the food and made much more inventive things than I would have. As an example to make you all hungry, we had sautéed vegetables and pasta with pesto sauce. Mmmm, fresh vegetables. As Dayle pointed out, they’re really cheap up in her farming community right now. I feel deprived by my city life now.

We got the vegetables and other provisions for dinner on Saturday night at The Mall, which has a gigantic grocery store in the middle of it. It has everything, after all. We were at The Mall because we could get there in the rain without much trouble, as the subway has a stop connected right to it. We didn’t really know what movies were going to be out, since everything gets to Japan at different times, but we figured we’d look, and if nothing good was out, we’d just wander around The Mall itself. Amazingly enough, Matrix: Reloaded was out! We had all thought it was coming out the next week. Happy, happy, I got to see a movie, I got to see a movie!!! Everyone in the US had been taunting me with having seen it already. Of course, my other friends here will probably kill me when they find out I already saw it, but I bet I could be persuaded to go see it again.

Before the movie started, we did all the usual Americans-in-Japan things and went to Starbucks and Muji. I finally found a picture album that has spaces big enough for pictures I had developed in the US, since pictures developed here are smaller. It’s actually not a picture album, really, but instead a postcard album, which strikes me as a rather Japanese thing. In any case, it works well; I got every picture I’ve taken since last summer in it, with space for another roll, I think. I feel very satisfied to have finally gotten all my pictures organized.

On Sunday, we got up “early” so we could have a leisurely breakfast and time to get ready before Dayle had to catch her bus at 11. Before she left, we went by Jupiter so she could stock up on imported food before going back to rural Numakunai. She seemed to have a good time. After we saw her to the bus station, Jamin and I walked through downtown to Sendai Mediateque, a famous feat of architecture. Jamin almost had an internship with the architect who designed it, but ended up in the firm of a student of said architect. The building is really neat. It has these twisted metal lattice columns as its only structural elements, and on each floor, the columns are different widths. Some are skinny at the bottom and wide at the top, others are inverted. (There are some good illustrations of this at the link above; scroll to the right to see them.) We just wandered around the lobby, but on the other floors there was apparently two galleries and a library. Jamin was very happy to have gotten to see it, so I don’t think his weekend in Sendai was wasted.

2003-05-30T01:56:00.000-07:00

Look! It’s a giraffe!
No, really, I’m not kidding! Yesterday, on my way into downtown Sendai, I saw a real live giraffe. And several zebras. They’re part of a circus that is setting up in what is now an empty lot, and up until sometime last month was a large building in the process of being torn down the entire time I’ve lived here. It’s right next to the big pedestrian overpass on the main road that I take to get to Sendai Station, and everyone was pausing at the top of the stairs to look at the animals. I didn’t notice the giraffe until I was up there, because it had been hidden behind the other trailers and stuff from street level. After I saw it, I smiled all the rest of the way to the station. I like giraffes. Seeing one in the middle of downtown made my day. I think I’ll get to see it again tonight when I go to pick Jamin up from the shinkansen. Yay!

Wheels
Last week, I saw one kid riding his bike to school while air guitaring. A day or so later, I saw another one air drumming. If they got together with a kid lip synching to his headphones, they could have a whole air band on bikes. They could start a roving entertainment business. (The thought amused me, at least.)

On my way home one day, while waiting to cross the street, I noticed a woman on a bike with a large bag of plastic bins in the child seat on the back of her bike. Then I noticed that the bag had small legs and a very small hand holding it in place. When the light changed and they started across the intersection, I also discovered that she had a son, about three or four years old, on the world’s smallest two-wheel bike, pedaling along quite efficiently ahead of her.

And finally, as I was leaving Mukaiyama a few days ago, I walked past the entrance yard of the elementary school behind us and saw two little girls riding around on unicycles. Yes, unicycles. I wonder if I will see anything like this in Michigan, or if life in the US will seem pale in comparison forever after.

2003-05-29T00:09:00.000-07:00

Rent to Own
Somehow, I’m doubting Japan has been paying much attention to the whole music copyright argument. They have a much different attitude toward music distribution and ownership here. There are lots of CD stores, true. But everyone listens to MDs all the time, a form in which no one actually produces music. So what do they do? They rent CDs just like videos, take them home, and rip them to their computers or record them directly to MDs.

I did this last weekend with Richard, who has taken to this idea quite quickly. He owns approximately 8 bazillion MDs now because he’s been renting so many and trading with his students. He wanted suggestions of different music to listen to, so I had a flashback to my brother’s skater-punk days and suggested The Offspring’s Smash and some No Doubt. I have no idea what Richard thought of them, but once he was finished with them, he gave them to me, and I’ve been having lots of fun. Last year for my research paper, I read some articles on societal memory formation, and from the mostly useless bits that I scanned, I remember reading that we remember music best from our early teen years, from about 11-13, and I’m certainly finding this to be true lately.

Now I’m going to walk home, listening to my obnoxious early-90s punk all the way. Heeheeheehee….

2003-05-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

Another Earthquake Update
The earthquake does not seem to have disrupted life here at all. They got the trains running again, including the shinkansen, so no teachers or students have been absent because of it. The one teacher who takes the shinkansen to get here every day was 2 minutes late to the morning meeting, and he got applause.

To answer the question, "What were you doing when the earthquake happened?" I was sitting on my futon, typing on the computer. When it first struck, it felt like a normal tremor, so I didn't think anything of it, but then it kept going and got really strong. I put the computer on the floor and sort of put my arms over my head, even though there was nothing that could fall on me, (at least, nothing that wouldn't kill me anyway, like the ceiling, or the building next door). I watched the building sway and mostly wondered what was going to happen next. It was actually kind of neat, since nothing bad happened, and I was not at all traumatized. I keep finding little things around the apartment now that fell down, like the little stuff animals I had on the windowsill, but that's it.

I sent out an email to nearly everyone I know in the US, letting them know I was okay, but none of them had heard more than a short blurb on the news, if anything. In South Africa, on the other hand, it made the lunchtime news and Danola received many frantic text messages from her brother. I bet it was bigger news on the West Coast.

I also got a technical explanation of the earthquake from a geologically inclined friend, so here's the precise explanation of what caused the quake:
"If you want to be perfectly accurate, the Northern Pacific Plate is moving in a clockwise direction and spiraling against North America - which is pushing right back due to Atlantic seafloor expansion. This results in the Pac Plate being pushed under and slightly tipped up back towards Asia and the rest of the Pacific rim. As those plates are also slightly less dense and also already car-crashed on top of the Pac Plate, you get an entire plate surrounded by subduction zones! Sudden irony develops in that "pacifica" meant "peaceful"... It's called the Ring of Fire for a reason, kiddies, and this volcanic morass is the Earth slowly swallowing the Pacific Ocean whole."

2003-05-26T02:57:00.000-07:00

Earthquake Update
According to Dayle, the quake was right off the coast of Iwate-ken and registered as a 6 on the Japan earthquake scale of 0-7. The news now specifies it as 6-, with a 5+ in surrounding prefectures. They also say that it started several kilometers down in the ocean off the coast of Miyagi-ken, registering as 7 at the epicenter. There is no possibility of tsunami. There have been no damages reported so far, but many places in Iwate are without power and phones. In Sendai, they now report that there is one fire and two people got trapped in an elevator. They are checking the condition of the shinkansen tracks and have suspended the trains for the time being. So far, I've counted 4 little aftershocks.

2003-05-26T02:35:00.000-07:00

Earthquake!
Just now, at approximately 6:25 pm, while I was writing that last entry, there was a huge earthquake in Sendai. It was the largest one I’ve ever experienced. It was violent enough to shake the apartment enough that the automatic shut-off feature on the heater kicked in, the lights swayed all over, the dish detergent fell off the side of the sink, the microwave shifted on top of the fridge, and the stereo did the same on the shelf. Nothing was broken, though, and it only lasted about two minutes.

2003-05-26T02:31:00.000-07:00

Pretzels
It is now time to venture into a new land in the world of Japanese snack foods, that of the flavored pretzel stick. The Japanese really seem to have latched onto the idea of stick-shaped snack foods. The last time I went to the grocery store, there were new things on the shelf. And they were on sale! So of course I bought them.

“They” in this case are flavored pretzels. There’s a popular brand of these called Pretz, which I’d had before, specifically the Tomato Pretz flavor, which is kind of like pizza or bread sticks with tomato sauce. I rather like them, but Mark thinks they’re disgusting. Poor boy, he has no taste. There's also Salad Pretz, but I haven't tried it, so I don't know if it's meant to just be regular pretzels to accompany salad, or actually salad-flavored.

This time in the grocery store, there were two new flavors of some other brand, the name of which I can’t read. But I can understand the pictures telling the flavors, and they were quite unique, which is pretty much guaranteed to get me to try things here, at least on that aisle of the grocery or convenience store. I shall now analyze for you the edamami and umeboshi flavored pretzels.

I really liked the edamami flavored ones. Edamami are steamed or boiled soy beans in their pods, usually served at izakayas, or sort of Japanese pubs. They’re warm and a little salty, and the only thing I like about having to go to such places, since I don’t drink. The pretzels managed to actually take on their flavor quite well in the “flavor dust” coating them. They were even vaguely green. I was greatly entertained.

The umeboshi pretzels were meant to taste like super-salty pickled plums. I like real umeboshi, but I don’t think these pretzels really did it for me. They were mostly just weird and not very satisfying. I think I’ll stick with the real thing or umeboshi-maki, the sushi roll I tried on sushi night with my landlords.

2003-05-23T02:10:00.000-07:00

Student Essays
Kamiyama-sensei's latest idea for getting students to actually learn English is to get all the second-year students to write essays. They have to be at least 10 sentences, on their topic of choice, and they have to bring the essays to me for correction before presenting them in front of class. (Guess how I've been spending my "lunch" hour since this project started.) Really, though, I like this project, because some of the essays are hilarious, some are really good and creative, and some are actually informative. So here you go. Enjoy. Pretend you're a teacher.

Favorite Sports by Shota Moriuchi

I belong to the soccer club. Soccer is loved by people all over the world. I think this sport is very simple but very difficult. Soccer is interesting, not only playing it but watching it, too. For example, the World Cup and J League. The World Cup is watched all over the world. People hope for their country’s winning. Soccer is life for them. It makes them excited and hot. I think soccer is more intersting than any other sport.

My Dream by Kanako Sasaki (This one was even better when heard out loud.)

I have a small dream. It is that I go to America to do one thing. I have been to America. I was in grade five. I couldn’t speak English then, but my mother made me buy and ice cream alone in an ice cream shop. My heart was pounding. I said, “Vanilla please.” But she gave me a banana ice cream. My mother laughed at me. From that experience, I want to go to America again. And I will buy a vanilla ice cream next time. It appears that Americans hear “banana” when Japanese say “vanilla.” Everybody, please be careful if you buy an ice cream in America.

My Life by Takako Suzuki (This one gives you insight into everyday high school life.)

I will talk about my life. Every day I get up at six. It is hard to get up early when I stay up late. But if I don’t get up, I’ll be late for school. So I have to do it. It takes me an hour to get to school. In that time, I can do a lot of things. Studying, reading books, listening to music, sleeping, and so on. I come back home at eight fifty usually. After dinner I try to study. But when I’m tired, I can’t.

What is Love? by Tomoko Sugawara (Note the next to last sentence.)

What is love for me? I thought about love recently. It may be a foolish idea, but I want to think it out. Somehow, humans are attracted to one another. It is a wonder, isn’t it!? But I think it has many reasons. For example, I was prepossessed by someone’s gentle manner. I feel excitement at heart over what someone said to me. Then, I want to be kind to others, too. But I can’t be kind to others because I am a wrongheaded girl. I think it’s good to be absorbed in love. But it is hard to do because we have responsibilities. For example, studying, club, and things I have to do. What is love for me? I will not be able to understand it. But, I want to remember that love is not for only me, but love is for each other. Love is more difficult than math. I want to keep on thinking about what is love.

A Book For You by Keita Yoneya (This student is hilarious, and wrote most of this completely on his own, with no corrections.)

I read my first touching novel in junior high school. At first I wasn’t interested in novels, but as I read, I found it was wonderful. Now there are more than one hundred novels in my life. Let me tell you about one of the best novels which I choose. The fantasy novel is named “Flowers for You and Moon” – Tsuki to anata ni hana taba wo. The story is about “Werewolf.” A hero, Touma Tsukimori is general college student except having the strongest power named “Ragnawolf.” One day a woman named Miyuki Yuzumoto came to him and said, “I am your wife.” Then the gear starts to turn. Bond, friendship, fight, hatred, sin, and love. Against them, Touma and Miyuki create their future which they believe with their own power. An action after the last battle was very impressive. The miracle wasn’t because of the power neither “Werewolf” nor “Ragnawolf.” It was love that had done miracles. But I won’t tell you more. If you are interested in the book hearing my explanation, please come to this library. The book is waiting for you.

Basketball by Toyohachi Yamashita (Another one that needed very little correction.)

I began to play basketball when I was ten. This was because I had read “Slam Dunk.” I remember buying a basketball after I had read it. Then I commuted to the park or to the gym to play basketball every day. I could make friends with basketball players. In a few countries, basketball is a national sport. In the Philippines, there are more than twenty professional teams, they are competing every day. There is a lot of basketball information in newspapers and magazines. I was surprised at the large treatment of basketball. In the sports shop, the basketball’s department secures a large space. Basketball is very popular. There are basketball goals in every park. I looked at children playing basketball there. I played it with them. I couldn’t understand their language, but basketball led me to communicate. One of them said to me, “My dream is that I will play in the NBA.” I was glad that I could have supported their dream. I think that my favorite player is Reggie Miller. He could be a “Hero” if Michael Jordan would not have existed. His 3 point shot is calm like time has stopped. I had a dream of becoming a great player like him. Because of fatigue, I strained my knees. Now, I can’t play basketball for a long time. But my feeling of “I like basketball” won’t change. In the future, I will be concerned with basketball.

Baseball by Hironori Konno (Let me never say I learned nothing from my students.)

I like baseball, because baseball is very interesting. I like both professional baseball and Senior High School baseball. Today, I’m talking only about the National Senior High School Baseball Championship Tournament. It has been played 84 times. But the final has been played 82 times, because Komesoudou and WWII forced it to stop. And WWII forced it to not be held from 1942 until 1945. The governmental orders forced the metal for Koshien Stadium to be recalled. After the war, the tournament started again. Today, it is played peacefully. Don’t make war to play. Enjoy sports in peace.

Self Introduction to Your Friend in Another Country by Yurie Sato (Yes, the title is from a textbook assignment. This one is just classic Japanese-student-speaking-English, and she worked really hard on it.)

Nice to meet you! My name is Yurie Sato. I’m sixteen years old. I’m from Iwate. I have moved seven times since I was born. You must be surprised. It was hard for me to part from my friends. But I could meet many new friends. Next, let me introduce to you my high school life. I am in the second year at Sendai Mukaiyama High School. My classmates study very hard and they are very cheerful. We study math and science very much. Those are difficult subjects, but I am interested in them. I belong to the brass band. I play the trombone. I spend my high school life practicing the trombone. I’m leading an enjoyable life every day. I like music very much: playing, singing, and listening. My hobby is playing the electone. When I am playing the electone, I am very happy. My electone is one of my friends. Please introduce you and your life to me. See you!

2003-05-21T01:30:00.000-07:00

Dana-san, can you tell me…?
Yesterday I spent about an hour and a half sitting with Kasahara-sensei, explaining strange phrases in a Larry King interview transcript. His family gets cable, and to practice his English, he watches American TV, lately apparently choosing to focus on really understanding Larry King Live. After he watches the show, he finds the transcript online and prints it out. He had highlighted all the phrases he really didn’t understand, and asked me to explain them. I can now definitively say that there are many weird things in the English language, and it’s terrible trying to explain some of them. Some of the most notable examples were, “Keeping it real,” and, “Did you fall out of the dumb tree and hit every branch on the way down?” I told Kasahara-sensei that it’s really best to not try and use the last one, as tone of voice is really what makes the difference with whether you can get away with saying it or not. As noted, his inflection isn’t very good, and gives native speakers the feeling that he’s being rude or insincere even when he’s not. Not much that can be done about that at this point.

So Cute!
Last night, I watched a nature program about baby animals. (“Baby” in Japanese is “aka-chan,” which literally means “red child.” Makes sense for humans, but it was kind of strange to hear it applied to pandas and dogs and seals.) It started with a segment about pandas in a zoo in China, and it was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. There were two babies and their mother. One of the babies was always climbing around on the mother, including lying flat on her back while she walked around at one point. The other one was very inquisitive. He wandered all over their indoor cage and started pawing at the bars. Then he decided to see if he could get out, so he stuck his head through. And it got stuck. He made the most pitiful little noises until one of the zookeepers came and pushed his head back through. Five minutes later, he did it again, and tried putting his paws through as well, to see if he could get all the way out. This time, his mother came over, grabbed the scruff of his neck in her mouth, and pulled him back through herself. He looked rather distraught.

The program then went on to Germany to explore the history of Japan’s favorite dog, the Miniature Dachshund, and then to Canada to look at baby seals, but it was the panda with his head stuck through the bars that made me laugh out loud.

I’m not eating chalk
Today, one of the other teachers brought in some hakka candy to leave at the end of each island of desks in the staff room. I’m not really sure what it is, but it’s kind of minty and sweet, and looks exactly like sticks of chalk. I didn’t realize it was there until the teacher who sits next to me picked up some and started eating it. When I looked up, he quickly said, “Oh, I’m not eating chalk! It’s candy. Really.” One of the other teachers then pretended he was going to put some chalk from the blackboard in the candy box to see if anyone would try to eat it. He didn’t leave the chalk there, but I wonder if anyone would have. There are advantages to sitting next to the collective candy dish.

2003-05-20T00:58:00.000-07:00

Randomness
Proud to bring you the very latest in snack food updates from Japan, we present to you the new spring line! This month’s discoveries are Double Berry KitKats and today, Hershey’s ‘n’ Fruit Lemon & Lime. It is, I quote, “White chocolate with Tangy Lemon & Lime.” It tastes, in my opinion, kind of like key lime cheesecake. I find myself saving the wrappers of all these things so I can prove they exist. Or at least of the KitKats. They come is such nice little boxes.

I am sitting here at my desk in the staff room and I look down the row. I didn’t really notice teachers’ desks last school term, but now I sit next to the most hyper-organized teacher in the staff room. His desk has a white sheet under the plastic protector, rather than green like everyone else; he has a pristine whiteboard that he sticks things to magnetically, all exactly lined up; he has a file box to contain all extraneous pieces of paper, all in upright folders; there’s a pen holder on magnets stuck to the front of the desk drawers with the pens organized by type. Two desks down from him, there’s a teacher with papers piled every which way, spilling over, stacked on top of files, stuck between folders. My own desk is kind of in the middle, more cluttered, but mostly organized. I can’t help that I’m expected to store the Monopoly game for the English club! It takes up a lot of space. It’s not my fault.

All of my female students are really into the skirt over jeans look. I really don’t get it. It doesn’t seem practical at all, as I’d imagine you’d have to buy all the skirts you intended to wear over jeans in a larger size than normal.

Another thing I really like about spring in Japan is all the wisteria. It brings back memories of the playground at my elementary school. Speaking of which, I was walking home just now behind two elementary school girls who had to stop outside this one office building to excitedly study bird’s nest built under the overhang.

Last night on TV, they showed an American sci-fi puppet show from 1965 about the Thunderbird International Rescue teams saving one of their spaceships from crashing into the sun. What saved them? A robot acting as a calculator. He then beat his creator at chess at the end of the show.

Tragedy has struck! Laox has been reduced to a mere one floor of its building, from its previous five. Yodabashi Camera proved to be too much competition, just across the square. Kamiyama-sensei reports that they have no more Mac merchandise. I wonder how many points I have left on my Laox card and what I should use them on. It’s going to be so sad to visit the store in its new incarnation. *sniff, sniff* It served me so well.

Oh, and I know that my plan link before I went to the US didn't seem to ever have anything new on it. Plans got switched to a new server while I was gone, and I didn't know until I got back. It was a good thought, in any case.

2003-05-15T03:12:00.000-07:00

Sakura, Sakura
Spring has finally sprung in Sendai. About a month ago, the cherry trees were in peak blossom, making my walks to and from school extremely picturesque. Everyone hears about the cherry blossom viewing parties in Japan, which seem to indicate that you have to go to specific places to really see them, but that is hardly the case. There are cherry trees growing all over Japan. They line bits of the sports fields at my schools and grow in patches all over the hills beyond Minami. They grow along the river walkway I take to Minami, the hills I climb to Mukaiyama, in the middle of the bamboo at the edge of the school driveway, even amongst the trees lining the parking lot that is my backyard.

But eventually, with rain and wind and passing time, sakura season must end, and the petals fall like snow to the ground. (I’m not just being poetic here; the Japanese use the verb “to snow” to describe the falling of cherry blossom petals.) Though cherry blossoms mark the beginning of spring for the Japanese, I consider it to be really spring now, with the coming of dogwoods, (I am a North Carolina girl, after all,) and tulips, pansies, and azaleas galore. The azaleas in particular just came out this past week, and my walk up Mukaiyama is infinitely more colorful now.

It’s spring, y’all! Happy, happy, welcome back the sun!

2003-05-12T04:49:00.000-07:00

Single Servings
You know, I really don’t usually have problems with culture shock, let alone reverse culture shock. (For those of you not indoctrinated into the whole abroad experience pop psychology rap, that’s culture shock experienced upon return to one’s home country.) I mean, sure, it was weird to realize how much taller, blonder, and, well, bigger Americans are than the Japanese, but I thought the same thing when I came back from Chile. It’s a perpetual thought, nothing new. I stayed in the US for a whole week and had no problem adjusting to being back in Grinnell, nor did I find myself slipping languages (unless it was to annoy Mark) or bowing to everyone. It all just seemed normal.

But then I had to get myself something to eat between flights in Minneapolis before returning to Japan. I didn’t have that much time and was down to $4 of American money, so I decided to just get a muffin and coffee. And lo, a Caribou Coffee did appear before me, and I did order a muffin and a medium coffee of the day, and culture shock did strike me most cruelly. What happened? The medium-sized cup of coffee they gave me was HUGE. I got a medium because that’s what I would have gotten in Japan if I was wanting a bit more than a casual cup. This, though, was about twice the size of what my brain tells me is a large in Japan. I couldn’t drink it all. I couldn’t believe anyone would ever order that much at once, nor could I comprehend what one would do with a large cup, if this was a medium. It was very disorienting.

2003-05-12T04:47:00.000-07:00

Joy in the Journey
I am back in Japan, my vacation done, and I am reminded all over again of why I actually sometimes enjoy the traveling involved in arriving at my destination more than the arrival itself. (That wasn’t the case this time. I had a marvelous time in Grinnell. I’m just trying to make my point here.) The entirety of my 20+ hours of traveling to get to Iowa was a joy.

I picked a good weekend to ride the shinkansen. Compared to my father, I’m not much of a morning person, but if I got to take the shinkansen all over Japan in the early morning of gorgeous sunny days, I’d get up without a single complaint. Because May 3-5 were the three main Golden Week holidays, one of which is Children’s Day, there were all sorts of decorations up. On Children’s Day, the koinobori get hung up. I knew what these carp-shaped banners were before, but the image I had in my head of what they would look like hung up were totally wrong. Because so much of northern Japan between Tokyo and Sendai is made up of small towns and farming areas, they have more space to go all out. I had thought that the koinobori would be relatively small, on poles for each house, off of balconies and such. Instead, many towns had erected giant flagpoles in open areas, sometimes several connected to each other with rope, sometimes just one really tall one with two rope lines coming down to attach to the ground, but all with huge, giant, brilliantly colored koi of various sizes fluttering in the breeze, glowing in the morning sun against the green spring fields and trees. When we passed through cities, I would smile when I saw smaller, more modest koinobori attached to people’s balconies and on the rooftops of apartment buildings. It was amazing to see, and I doubt I would have seen it at all if I hadn’t been on the train.

After an amazingly painless breeze through the ticketing process at Narita airport, I was ensconced in my window seat on the plane, and made another wonderful discovery. This is why I will never become a truly jaded airline traveler. Oh, sure, they may lose my luggage forever or cause me inconvenience or delay on occasion, but then, well… Then I get on a direct flight from Japan to Minneapolis, see sunset and dawn up above the clouds within the space of four hours, and watch in wonder as we fly over the snow-capped, endless peaks of Alaska and northern Canada. Mountains never fail to remind me of the meaning of the word “majesty.”

And then I landed in Minneapolis 15 minutes early, walked through customs confused about the extreme lack of people, and spent my 4-hour layover eating lunch with Ann at the park by the river. Idyllic.

2003-05-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

Whereabouts
It's time for a vacation! Whoo-hoo! However, this vacation is most likely to only be really interesting for me and the people I see, as it will be at the ever-lovely, though somewhat remote Grinnell College, and thus totally unrelated to Japan and not on this blog. I do promise to wander around unconsciously half-bowing to people and doing annoying Japanese conversational things, like saying "Nn," all the time, instead of "uh-huh" or "yeah." I'll even wear Engrish-y clothes! But I'll be gone from blogland for a week.

Should you find yourself totally bored or terribly distraught by my virtual absence from your life, you can go check my less thematic, much more random plan, which is a Grinnell thing.

Now I have to run off to buy Pocky for all those deprived people in Iowa. Ja, ne!

2003-04-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

Gratification
Today the coolest thing happened. I only had one class to teach, and it was yet another self-introduction class, so I wasn’t thinking much about it. Everything went well, I got the students to interview each other and introduce their partners, and they actually asked me questions in English in the last 5 minutes of class. As I was gathering all my stuff to go, one student came up to talk to me. I thought she looked kind of familiar, but then again, all my students do.

“Last January 26, I was standing in the hallway crying. You talked to me. I was very happy. Thank you.”

It was the girl who had been so nervous and crying after her entrance exam interview. I’m glad she made it into Mukaiyama. And I’m glad I made a difference for her. I feel like perhaps I’ve done some good here after all.

2003-04-29T23:20:00.000-07:00

PTA Day
Both of my schools just had their PTA days. This is a big deal at Japanese schools. They are held intentionally on weekends or holidays so all the parents can come without taking time off of work. Minami had theirs on Saturday, and Mukaiyama’s was yesterday, which was Greenery Day.

The day starts with two periods of classes, which parents can observe. Then the “school day” is over, and the PTA meetings start. There’s a general meeting, then each grade has a meeting, then each classroom has a meeting. When I left Mukaiyama at 4 yesterday afternoon, the class meetings were just starting. Thank goodness I got to leave.

After the classes were over yesterday, the English club asked me to bring the Monopoly board they gave my predecessor and play with them. I have never before played Monopoly with people so dedicated to such cut-throat strategy. I’d never actually gotten to the point of building houses before, but I did this time, and that was nothing compared to the boy next to me who was determined to get a hotel. The rent on his properties was above $200 by the time I left. I auctioned off all my property after two hours, and he was very eager to get my full set of green properties. He reported that he won the game when he brought back the box.

A few of my teachers asked me if we have PTA in the US, which I thought was funny, since it’s an imported English term. There’s no way that’s a Japanese acronym, but they don’t even think about it anymore. The idea that PTA day is not such a humongous, involved production in the US was very foreign to them.

2003-04-29T23:18:00.000-07:00

Back in the Day
On Monday, I finally saw Brian, my friend from home who has also been teaching in Japan all year. He and his brother Paul are much further south and west than me (Paul is almost in Hiroshima), so it has been hard to find a way to see either of them. It turns out that Brian’s girlfriend Victoria is has a good friend from university, Jane, who is also a Sendai ALT, so they used this holiday weekend to make the long bus ride north.

Brian and Victoria got to Sendai on Saturday, but I had PTA day at Minami, as did Jane, so we both got Monday off to make up for it, which seemed like a good time to try to get together. I met them downtown in time for lunch, and then we wandered around “shopping,” or rather, talking. Jane and Victoria spent the whole time talking about friends they knew from uni, (just to be British about it,) so Brian and I retaliated by talking about our parents and people we knew from high school. Nothing like reminiscing about the politics of high school orchestra.

Brian and Victoria, and Paul, for that matter, are all staying next year, and they’ve already started planning how to maximize their vacation time. This weekend started the Golden Week period, with yesterday (Tuesday) being the first of the Golden Week national holidays. This year’s Golden Week is very disappointing, since two of the holidays fall on the weekend anyway. Next year, though, people will be able to take nearly two straight weeks off by only using two or three days of paid leave. I feel cheated. But since I won’t be here next year, I’ll just have to read Brian’s blog about his fabulous vacations like everyone else.

2003-04-25T02:13:00.000-07:00

Geography Lesson
I really ought to start making locking myself out of my apartment a regular occurrence. I ran over to the post office when I got home this afternoon, and automatically locked the door behind me without thinking about it. It is by far more convenient to do this at 4 in the afternoon, rather than after 11 at night. I just walked across the street to my landlord’s office and got the key this time.

It’s great! Every time I go over there, I get plied with tea and snacks, and get an entertaining bilingual geography lesson. Today I got to see pictures of Nepal and Tibet. I love mountain countries. I want to go. My landlords appear to have made friends all over the world simply by handing out origami cranes and Polaroid photos wherever they go. My landlady also showed off her black face-covering head cloth thingy from Yemen, and gave me my choice of little purse from Nepal. I chose purple, of course.

Among the interesting things I found out was that they make candles out of yak butter in Tibet. And women wear these really heavy-looking turquoise-studded headdresses that then run down to a belt, which is tied to the end of their many long braids. My landlady was dismayed to hear that I had hair that long before I cut it all off.

Now I just need to find something nice to get her from Iowa when I go in a week. Somehow, corn isn’t quite as interesting as stationery from Tibet.

2003-04-25T02:12:00.000-07:00

Vignettes
The fastest way to bike to school is to ride your bike while holding onto one of the handlebars of your friend’s scooter.

Judging by the big grin on the little boy’s face, the best way to get anywhere at all is in a front-mounted child seat on your dad’s bicycle, with the wind in your face and able to see the complete view.

I passed a 60+ man today wearing black leather pants, a plaid dress shirt, and a windbreaker.

According to the guy driving the truck, the guy in the car in front of him should not have chosen waiting for the light to change as a good excuse to get engrossed in reading his manga.

2003-04-23T00:42:00.000-07:00

How’s their English?
This past weekend, Sharon had another one of her parties where she tried to see how many people she could pack into her apartment. I think she figures she has to put all that space to good use, since she has to pay the rent on it anyway.

This time, she’d managed to invite a lot of Japanese people, as opposed to mostly ALTs, and I had a very interesting conversation with Sato-san, the English whiz at Map Tour, a travel agency a lot of the ALTs patronize pretty much solely due to him. He asked how the English speaking ability of most of my JTEs was. He said that when he went to Minami, the teachers didn’t speak much English at all, and very much concentrated on grammar all the time. He thinks that if he hadn’t gone to private English lessons for 4.5 years, he never would have survived his year and a half in San Francisco.

On the train home, I mentioned this conversation to another college student who had been at the party, and she said she agreed. It seems to be the opinion of most of the young people in Japan, that being anyone who graduated from high school in the past 10-15 years, that the JTEs don’t speak enough English in the classroom and don’t encourage the development of speaking ability in their students. So how is it that ALTs can realize this, and ex-students can realize this, but so many JTEs can’t, not to mention the Education Ministry?

That’s not really fair, though. JTEs and the Ministry do realize this. But change comes extremely slowly to the educational system in Japan, witness the fact that the JET program has been in place for 20 years and ALTs are just beginning to have an impact on the true method of teaching oral communication. The Ministry has announced that a listening section will be added to the national English exams in 3 years, so entering first year high school students are starting to be prepared now, but I find it really depressing that this is the only reason that some of my JTEs think oral communication class is important now.

Several of my JTEs, the ones with better speaking ability, oddly enough, have expressed the same dissatisfaction that I have with the way grammar, reading, and oral communication are taught as completely separate subjects, even by different teachers for each class. While this division of labor may make academic sense, it fragments the learning process and serves to make English, one of the most living languages on the planet, into something as dead as ancient Greek. It’s no wonder students rarely develop the ability or confidence to speak out loud on a regular basis. They’ve been terrorized into a complete fear of using the wrong grammar. None of the stuff they learn in grammar classes taught almost exclusively in Japanese is translating over in their brains as something that actually applies to spoken English. Alas.

2003-04-23T00:41:00.000-07:00

Lady’s Tea
I’m getting behind on my blog entries! Oh, no! I blame it all on having to actually do work now. A radical concept, I know.

This past Friday at Minami, we had the “Lady’s Tea Party” during the lunch hour. For once, I was actually there while they were doing something fun! They’d tried to invite me to ladies only parties before, but always on days when I had to be at Mukaiyama. I’m not sure how often they do this tea party, but I think maybe it was just for the beginning of the year.

At the noon recess, Mrs. Shiokai and I went downstairs to the conference room with all the other women of the school, that being maybe 12-15 in total. The tables were set up in a square, with each place around the perimeter set with a slice of cake and some rice cookies. We got to pick where to sit based on which cake we wanted, and then told the office lady which kind of tea we wanted.

This being a Japanese party at the beginning of the year, each person of course got up and made a short introductory speech. This is the kind of thing I really know how to do in Japanese, so I got a nice round of applause and some gratifyingly surprised looks. Yay, rah, I can speak Japanese! Sort of.

Anyway, it was all very nice and pleasant, and the cake was really good, and there was bonding. Oooh, aaah. Judging from the materials left on my desk, I don’t think Minami has ever had a female ALT, so this was no doubt a novel occurrence.

2003-04-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

Sushi Bar
Apparently, I should have lost my key earlier. Now that I’ve reintroduced myself to my landlords, they want to adopt me. I went to the post office last Friday, and on the way over, my landlady saw me and invited me into their office for tea. We had a nice visit, with one of those long, involved conversations that take place even when neither of the participants speak the other’s language much beyond key nouns and unconjugated verbs. (This once again makes me truly wish I could convey to my students that perfect grammar is totally unnecessary. Getting your basic meaning across is what counts in real life, at least to start.)

During this conversation, I found out that she and her husband, and one of her friends, otherwise known as her “travel friend,” have gone all over the world. She went through an extremely impressive list of countries she’s been to, basically sorting them by continent. When you’ve been so many places that you have to sort them by continent to keep them straight, you’ve traveled a lot. I went and got the few pictures of Chile and Peru that I have here, and she showed me a few from the Middle East that she had there in the office.

Somehow, the conversation got around to what kinds of Japanese foods I like, (this is a frequent question,) and she asked if I’d had sushi. I said I’d had some in the US, but not in Japan. Well, that just would not do! With superb timing, her husband came back to the office just then, and she conferred with him about which would be the best day to take me out for sushi. Which is how I ended up spending this past Wednesday evening in a sushi bar.

It was really neat! When I’ve had sushi in the US, it was always brought out from the kitchen on a plate. At this place, though, they make the sushi right in front of you, as you order it. The restaurant is set up as a long bar facing the fish displays. Every 5 or 6 places, there is a different sushi chef stationed to take orders. When you place your order, he picks out the appropriate slab of fish, cuts off two pieces, molds little rice balls, applies wasabi to the fish, and places the fish on top of the rice. Both sushi were then placed in front of you on a leaf that served as the serving platter in front of each customer.

My landlady put herself in charge of ordering for me. I know I had maguro sushi twice, which is lean tuna, and salmon, and some other white-colored fish, as well as egg sushi, which involves no fish at all. I had a little dish of shoyu (soy sauce) to dip them in, and they were all very good. The chef was at first concerned that I might not want wasabi, but I assured him it was fine. I like wasabi. Mmmm, spicy food.

The most interesting thing to watch, though, was when he made sushi rolls, or maki. I really like kappa maki (cucumber roll), which I knew from having had it before. To make this, the chef took a long piece of nori (seaweed paper), spread rice on it, sliced two long, thin pieces from a cucumber to put on top of the rice, and then used the little bamboo mat that the seaweed had been placed on top of to roll the whole thing into a perfect, tightly packed cylinder. He then sliced the cylinder into 6 little rolls, each about an inch thick. At the end of the meal, my landlady ordered umeboshi maki (pickled plum roll), just to see if I’d like it. I’m apparently a very strange foreigner for actually liking umeboshi. The roll was made pretty much the same way, except the umeboshi used to put down the middle of the rice is actually made into a paste, rather than being individual plums that have to be pitted and placed there. Umeboshi is really salty, and has a bit of a bite to it in concentrated form as well, so the three of us shared those rolls. I thought they were good.

At this point, I was very full. My landlady told me I’d hardly eaten anything at all, but I’m sure I had about twice as much as she did. Maybe it’s just because I’m Western, or perhaps because I’m American, from the land of “big steaks.” In any case, we’d all had enough to eat, so then it was off to the world’s tiniest bar/lounge, owned by some of their friends. There was one male bartender and two women who seemed to be functioning as hostesses. They took our coats when we came in, sat at our table with us, and prepared our drinks. If I’m not mistaken, my landlord excused my not drinking any alcohol by claiming I was Muslim. I’m not sure if they took that as a joke or not, but in any case, I managed to get away with only drinking ginger ale, which made me happy.

One of the women was just extremely happy to have me there, as it gave her an excuse to try out English. She was, as one says in Japan, very genki. The other woman was quieter, but extremely nice, and they both took turns teaching me words of Sendai and Iwate dialect. The bartender came and sat with us, too, after he’d finished preparing the little snack dishes. After a while, my landlady pulled out her very impressive photo album from their latest trip, which was to Yemen, and we all looked at those pictures. If I heard correctly, one of the stops on the tour was to see the house of Osama bin Laden’s father, who had 46, or maybe it was 64, wives, and over 100 children. There were also many gorgeous desert pictures and quite a few of my landlady and her friend in native dress, which caused much giggling.

When it was time for us to leave, the hostesses went to the elevator with us and escorted us all the way back out to the street, saying “thank you” and “good-bye” several times, in both English and Japanese. My landlady said they were very excited that I had come. I’m such a celebrity. However will my ego adjust when I return home?

2003-04-18T02:08:00.000-07:00

Peach Collon Update
I am pleased to report that Peach Collon lives up to tastiness expectations. It’s not quite as good as Mango, but this is not a major failing by any means.

2003-04-15T23:10:00.000-07:00

It’s All for You
You, my dedicated readers, have no idea the sacrifices I make for you, but I shall attempt to enlighten you. It is just for you, I swear, that I purchase the newest flavors of Pocky and Collon to be found in the convenience store. Someone with dedication must taste-test these new offerings, and report back the findings. I have decided to let that person be me.

The very latest on the Pocky front is Choco Banana Pocky. It comes in attractive yellow-and brown-striped packaging, to mimic the appearance of the Pocky sticks themselves, and the box features a background of bananas. As for taste, there isn’t much chocolate making itself evident, but the general flavor is much like that of banana pudding. Not bad at all, quite edible. Much better than Green Tea Mousse Pocky, in my opinion.

Another recent discovery was Peach Collon. I have high hopes for this snack item. I was bitterly disappointed when the delectable Mango flavor did not stay in the stores for much longer than a month this summer. The basic flavors of Chocolate and Cream are all right, but nothing special, and Cheesecake, the star of the winter season, palled quickly. Peach shall be sampled sometime this week and reported upon forthwith, rest assured. I shall not rest until I have updated your knowledge of Japanese snack foods!

2003-04-14T02:33:00.000-07:00

Easily Entertained
I just have to point out that the themed ads at the top of this page, which change according to what my latest posted content is, are hilarious. After I lost my keys, they were for electronic locks for home or office, and after "Bad Hair Day," they were about finding electric hair clippers on-line. I check my own blog just to see what they'll be next. But then, I'm easily entertained.

2003-04-14T02:27:00.000-07:00

Enkai Season
Aaahhhh, finally, it appears that enkai season may really be over. In the past month, I have been to one overnight onsen and 3 enkais. There are too many obligations, in my opinion, associated with the end of one school year and the beginning of the next. One must go out to expensive dinners and drinking parties one week to say good-bye to the teachers who are leaving, and then a week later, one must do it all again to welcome the new ones. But this past Friday was the welcoming enkai for Mukaiyama, and I think I’m now done “celebrating.” This is a good thing, since I’m also expected to shell out ~$50 each time.

Friday night I went downtown to the JAL City hotel. Of course, I hadn’t been told it was a hotel beforehand, so I was concerned from just looking at the name that it might be a karaoke palace. Engrish-named buildings are suspicious to me. But it turned out to be a hotel after all, owned by the JAL airlines because it’s right across from Sendai Station, so I was much relieved. I’m still on target to complete my goal of avoiding karaoke for my entire year in Japan.

We were assigned to the different tables in the banquet room by picking a paper crane with a slip of paper in its wing. I was at a table with several of the PE teachers, the science teacher who sat next to me all last term, and one of the English teachers who used to teach 2nd-year classes with me. He and the science teacher started the evening by discussing the merits of various brands of Japanese beer as they filled people’s glasses preparatory to the toast. As he proceeded to drink more beer, he also became more willing to translate things for me and in general talk, so this enkai was much more fun than the farewell one, which was so boring I didn’t even bother to write about it.

The general purpose of the evening was speeches. First there was the toast. Then the new principal was introduced, and he made a speech. Then each of the new teachers was introduced by someone in their department, after which, they made a speech. This is not very exciting, particularly when you can’t understand what’s being said, but at a Japanese party, this doesn’t matter.

Why doesn’t it matter? Because no one is paying attention anyway. Throughout the entire party, the wait staff are taking old dishes away, replenishing the communal beer bottles, and bringing in the next courses. People are constantly eating, talking to their neighbors, pouring drinks for the people around them, whatever. It’s all very quiet, but it’s rather obvious that no one is really giving much more than the corner of their ear, so to speak, to the person at the microphone.

The main thing is really the food. And the drinking, I suppose, for those other people who like alcohol, but I’m not one of them. There were about 8 different courses in all, each on an individual little dish. We started out with some sort of appetizer, followed by a sashimi plate, then little ham and cheese squares, and an egg cup. Then came the main dishes. First there was fish with asparagus, followed by a small steak with a slice of eggplant and tomato. By this point, I was getting rather full, but we still had bowls of rice with vegetables, and for dessert, cheesecake and melon. I thought I would explode.

The evening ended with one of the men who works in the office, a very small, quiet man, doing his traditional “Bansai” speech, which is basically throwing your arms in the air three times while saying “Bansai!,” something along the lines of “Hip, hip, hooray!” As far as I can tell, this is that poor man’s only job at the school, because I’ve never seen him do anything else. He’s asked to do this at every party.

And of course, no event would be complete without singing the school song. Japanese high schools have a real thing about singing the school song. We’ve sung the Mukaiyama one so often in the past month, I’m actually starting to remember it, even though I still have no clue what any of it means. There’s one part about the Hirose-gawa, otherwise known as the river that runs through the middle of Sendai, but that’s about all I can pick up.

Afterward, everyone broke up without anyone inviting me to go to a second party, so I didn’t have to feel guilty about making an excuse. I walked back to the station with the teacher who had been sitting next to me, and we had an interesting conversation about the merits of a school year schedule with an actual summer break between the years. He says he really wishes the schedule would change to a September – May cycle, so the teachers would have adequate time to prepare curriculum changes for the coming year. As it stands, they get barely 2 weeks. I certainly agree with him. I see no advantages to a year that starts in April and gets broken up by long breaks in the middle of semesters. I doubt it’ll change any time soon, though. I wish them all good luck with that.

2003-04-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

Bad Hair Day
This is not a terribly insightful entry here; in fact, one might even call it shallow. However, it’s also true. I don’t know what it is, but once men in Japan reach a certain age, say about 50, and find that they have any sort of hair scarcity, they cease to be able to get a decent haircut. It’s like there’s some law of nature that says they have to grow their hair long on one side and do this elaborate swirling comb-over that does nothing to hide a bald spot and everything to emphasize it. If they realized they had thinning hair early enough in their lives that they beat the law-of-nature deadline, they can have a decent haircut forever, but those lucky men are sadly few. The worst thing is that all the other men in Japan are so incredibly fashion conscious, so the comparison makes the contrast all the more unfortunate. Japanese men either look like manga characters or complete dorks. I can’t watch the news anymore, because their war analyst’s hair is just too painful. It’s enough to make you want to attack them with a set of electric clippers. Poor guys.

2003-04-10T04:06:00.000-07:00

Bringing Politics to You
It’s that time of year. Yes, it’s election season. Oh, goody! I’m so thrilled.

Japanese politicians are really annoying. They aren’t satisfied with giving publicized speeches in some central location where interested people can go and I can avoid it. Oh, no, they have to get out and interact with the public. Most specifically, they have to get out in vans with loudspeakers mounted on the top and drive down my street at about 5 mph, giving their little spiel, complete with many, many “onegaishimasu”s, or pleases and thank yous. At one point this past weekend, I had two vans going past my house in opposite directions. Most of them have perky women speaking into the microphones, just as representatives, but just a little while ago, while I was trying to watch my mere half hour of English-language news, there was an actual male politician giving a full-blown speech pretty much right outside my window for about 10 whole minutes. It really annoys me that I don’t know how to lean out the window and yell at them to go away. I can be properly annoyed in English, Spanish, and a bit in German, but in Japanese, I only know how to be nice a polite.

These same people feel compelled to park their vans on the side of the street and stand around in a group waving at the passer-by with their nice little white-gloved hands. That’s all well and good, except when it’s on my way home, on a narrow, winding two-lane road with no sidewalks, so all the cars have to swerve into the other lane to get around them and I have to cross to the other side of the street so as not to get run over. Honestly, they’re a public nuisance. Which, come to think of it, is how I feel about a lot of politicians in general anyway.

2003-04-08T22:20:00.000-07:00

We Want You…
…to join our club!

This morning’s main activity was to watch the student council’s presentation of after school clubs to the new students. Mukaiyama has a lot of clubs. Some of them just told the students what their club was, and wouldn’t they consider joining it, but most of them went for entertainment value in their presentations.

Kyudo started it all off with an archery demonstration, no talking at all. Baseball sent one player forward to slide into “base” in front of the students, then take his shirt off and demonstrate his swing. (He was embarrassed and put his shirt over his face as he went back to his seat, while all his friends teased him.) Soft tennis had a video presentation. Regular boys’ tennis had their star player return serves while yelling in an amusing fashion, hopefully not hitting any of the audience members. Women’s basketball did running circle passes, women’s volleyball batted balls back and forth in pairs, men’s volleyball did spikes. Men’s badminton set up their net with one team member sitting on the floor with an apple on his head, another next to him tossing the birdies over the net, and two other boys on the other side trying to hit the apple. They never did get it, but they did nail the sitting boy in the chest a few times. Kendo staged a massacre with kills designated by popping the balloon they each had taped to the top of their helmets. The soccer boys did a coordinated dance routine, complete with the removal of shirts and some macho muscle posing. Gymnastics had girls doing rhythmic routines with balls and hoops, and boys doing tumbling, one boy being the star of the show with impressive tumbling passes and some break dancing, and another being the class clown, with a lot of impressive posturing before doing very pitiful somersaults and cartwheels. I’m not sure if everyone knows he’s actually very good and he was just clowning, of if he’s just a clown in general. Junior Red Cross had a little pantomime about saving one of their group members who had been in a “gun battle” after throwing candy at the crowd. The chemistry club showed off their color-changing mixtures. There was some sport I didn’t understand at all that looked like a cross between basketball and soccer, with the boys passing lightweight volleyballs back and forth with sticky-taped fingers on one hand, faking around another player, and attempting to throw the ball into a soccer goal past the goalie. These were just the most memorable ones, too. To end it all, the boys of the cheer squad came out in their black uniforms and long headbands and proceeded to cheer/yell at the crowd in grand traditional style.

It was a lot more entertaining than most assemblies I have to go to in the gym.

2003-04-08T21:54:00.000-07:00

Back to School
And so the new school year officially begins. Yesterday was the first day of school, which pretty much meant a full day of ceremonies. Well, at least it was for me. The students and homeroom teachers also had to deal with getting organized in their new classes. But this blog is all about me, me, me. Sort of.

Back to the point. In the morning, there was the Opening Ceremony, during which the new principal was introduced. He’s rather more charismatic than the one who retired. He did a little a capella karaoke at one point, and all the students were clapping along. Then all the new teachers were introduced, each of them giving the requisite “Hello, my name is…, please treat me kindly,” speech. Then the new homeroom teachers were announced for the second and third year reorganized classes, as well as the coaches and advisors for all the clubs. This was the part that the students had been waiting for, since their homeroom teacher will be an important figure in their lives for the next year. One student jumped in the air when Kamiyama-sensei’s name was called for class 2-1. I thought that was pretty cute.

After the ceremony, the students all went to their new homerooms and worked on preparing for the Entrance Ceremony in the afternoon. Around noon, the teachers all had to go get the staff picture made. The female teachers all stood on the row right behind the principal, vice-principal, and other somehow significant teachers’ chairs, while all the male teachers took up the three rows of risers behind us, just to give you some idea of the male/female ratio. Other than waiting for a couple of the PE and science teachers to remember their suit jackets so as to look presentable, that went quite quickly. The Japanese are very good at group photo organization.

In the afternoon, the Entrance Ceremony took place. This was when all the new first year students officially entered the school. It wasn’t much of a ceremony, as far as length and pomp go. The students marched in with their homeroom class, dressed in basically business attire, and were seated by their homeroom teacher. The principal, now dressed in a tux, gave a speech, followed by a representative of the new students. Each of the students’ names was called by their homeroom teacher, and they stood up at their name. That was pretty much it.

What I had the most fun noticing was what the teachers and parents were wearing. All the male homeroom teachers had changed to nicer black suits if they hadn’t come to school in one, and had changed their normal ties for white ones. Cute, tiny little Handa-sensei, the woman who sat across from me in the staff room last school year, was such a contrast to all those suited men, since she only comes midway up my chest. All the parents were wearing fairly nice clothes (I only spotted one mother in kimono), but they had all brought house slippers to wear in the gym. This makes me suspect that all Japanese people have a pair of cheap cloth slippers to take to formal occasions at any time. This is not to say that the slippers are particularly formal themselves; rather, they are predominantly flower or plaid print. Who am I to smile at this, though? My indoor shoes are bright purple.

2003-04-07T06:37:00.000-07:00

It Had to Happen
I knew it was going to happen at least one time in my year here in Japan, from the very moment I saw my front door. I was going to lock myself out of the house. And as predicted, this weekend, I did. In the rain. At night. It’s all too easy to do this in my apartment. My door just has one of those push-button locks that are locked from the inside. This of course means that if I lock my door, pull it to, and then realize that my keys are inside, well, that’s just too bad for me, now isn’t it?

Up to now, I’ve been really, incredibly paranoid about this. I would end up checking my bag or pockets for a key two or three times before closing the door. But after 8 months, my brain finally got to the point where it assumed I’d automatically put in a key, and this one fateful time, I didn’t check.

It was Saturday night, and I went to Shiogama to have dinner with Sharon, Laura, and Kristel to welcome Kristel back from Shanghai. It did, of course, turn into a long dinner of lots of talking and chatting and sub-conversations. We were in an izakaya, which is sort of like a Japanese version of an idealized English pub, that neighborhood bar/restaurant where everyone knows the proprietor and each other. The only other people there were a group of men in the back raised tatami area, and after we had been there for nearly two hours, and various of them had cruised our table on their way to the bathroom (presumably after quite a few beers), they got up the nerve to send the proprietress over to us to ask if 1) we spoke Japanese, 2) were going to be in Japan for a while, and 3) if we’d care to join them at their table. We decided we had perhaps been there long enough. This was an extremely rare occurrence. Men in Japan just don’t make moves toward women that way, especially foreign women. I think Laura might have been thinking about going back some other night to see if it happened again.

In any case, I caught the train back to Sendai at about 10 pm, and about 2/3 of the way there, I just knew I didn’t have my key. I checked. Sure enough, it wasn’t there. I knew exactly where it was, in my house. Both of my keys actually; I could see them in my mind, each in a bag that was most definitely not the one I had with me. I had, of course, looked at a key before I left and thought, “I should put that in my bag. Oh, but wait, I’ll take the other one,” and then didn’t.

I got back to my apartment and considered my door. It’s a very thin, unconvincing door, and I had been somewhat cynical about its ability to keep out a determined bad guy. But now I was the one considering breaking into my apartment, and I suddenly developed a far greater respect for my door. First of all, it opens outward into a very small landing, so there’s no use in throwing one’s shoulder against it. The hinges have no exposed screw heads. The key hole has deep grooves that can’t be faked with the screwdriver attachment of a pocketknife, which in any case was on the other side of the door, where the actual keys were, too. There’s a protector plate that sticks out over the doorjamb to cover the area with the latch, preventing the clichéd attempt with the credit card. (Also, I think that may only really work on doors that open inward.) I have a broken umbrella outside, courtesy of my predecessor, which I broke a metal bit off of to try to pick the lock, but it just kept bending, so I gave up.

I called Richard, since he lives not 7 minutes away, but he didn’t answer his phone, and I knew his girlfriend had just had her first week at work, so he was only getting to see her on the weekend. My landlord supposedly lives above his office across the street, but so do a bunch of other people in other apartments, and I didn’t know which was theirs, nor could I remember their name, which wouldn’t have helped anyway, as I couldn’t read any of the kanji on the mailboxes in the foyer. In the end, I called Sharon again, caught the last train back to Shiogama at 2 minutes to midnight, and spent the night there.

As Sharon said, I was meant to be in Shiogama for the weekend, because Danola came back from her 2 weeks in South Africa on Sunday morning. We went over to her apartment around noon, where Sharon made her lunch and she filled us in on all the gossip from her soap-opera life back home. She and Laura have been particularly vociferous in their observations about Japanese men not treating them as if they were females, with curves and figures and all, but instead as intimidating foreign women who speak English and just aren’t Japanese. So her big observation about being in South Africa was that she definitely felt like a woman again. (This might have had something to do with the fact that she was around her ex-husband and two ex-boyfriends.) I told her that by the time she goes home for real, she’ll be the biggest flirt in the world just because all the men will react to her again. She didn’t deny it. In any case, she had a ball and was very happy with life in general.

But then I had to deal with getting back into my apartment. I called Kamiyama-sensei. I said, “I’m locked out of my apartment,” and he responded with, “Why?” which Danola and I thought was hilarious. When I explained that the keys were inside the apartment and I was not, he understood and called my landlord. The landlord did indeed have an extra key, and provided, via Kamiyama-sensei, his phone number and a description of where exactly his apartment was. I also got his name, which I am a terrible, horrible, very non-Japanese person for not remembering after meeting him one time 8 months ago. I made my way back from Shiogama, got the key, unlocked my door, and received a bag of snacks from my landlord’s wife upon returning the key. They’re such nice people. I’m going to have to get them some sort of nice gift before I leave.

So that was my rather more adventurous weekend than I intended. Now that I’ve done it once, I never have to do it again. That’s the way it works, right?

2003-04-04T23:00:00.000-08:00

Studio Ghibli Magic
Before I left the US, I’d never heard of Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli. I’d vaguely heard of “Princess Mononoke,” and I did actually see it during the summer while at Japanese summer language school, but I’d never seen anything else from the most famous Japanese animated movie studio. Thanks to the wonder of my television actually receiving 5 whole channels, I get movies every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night. So far this year, I’ve seen (in edited form, I grant you) “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke” (undubbed), “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” and “Porco Rosso.” These are all by Hayao Miyazaki, but the other main Studio Ghibli director is Isao Takahata, who did “Grave of the Fireflies,” which you may recall I saw with Richard a while ago.

Last night’s contribution was “Porco Rosso.” It’s based on an Italian story, or at least set in Italy, judging by all the writing on the newspapers and such. I find it really interesting how most of the stories come from all sorts of different cultures, but still manage to have a lot of similarities. “Laputa” is very Holland-ish influences, with lots of windmills and such, but still a very fantastic setting. The next projected movie from Miyazaki is “Howl’s Moving Castle,” based on a children’s novel by a British fantasy author. “Mononoke” is basically set in ancient Japan, while “Spirited Away” is kind of wherever, modern-day, and then really obviously elsewhere. Oddly enough, “Laputa” and “Porco Rosso” have similar airplane and pirate themes.

Another similarity is the presence of very strong female characters. The lead pirate in “Laputa” is female, as is the main character. The airplane mechanic’s granddaughter in “Porco Rosso” designs and builds the plane with the help of all the neighborhood women, no men. Her grandfather just installs the engine. In “Mononoke,” all the strong leaders of groups are female (the princess, the warrior-woman, the spunky bossy woman, the wolf goddess). In “Spirited Away,” the owner of the inn is the witch woman, in charge of everything, and the maid Chihiro is put in the charge of is strong-willed and always talking back. If I were still in college, I’d be tempted to write a paper on gender roles in Miyazaki films, but I’m not, and I wouldn’t get any credit for it, so instead I’ll just sort of vaguely mention it here on my blog, without having to do all that tedious analysis. Anyone still in college who can manage to get credit for this should feel free to steal the idea.

Even having seen the majority of these movies in Japanese with no subtitles or anything, I’ve enjoyed them immensely. I love the animation style, and there are some very clever little things you start to notice after seeing a few of them, like the fact that the brand of the airplane engine in “Porco Rosso” was “Ghibli.” All Miyazaki’s movies manage to capture a feeling of magic and wonder that I feel like Disney’s been missing for a while, as they pursue comic relief more than fantasy. (And those that know me know that I don’t have an anti-Disney bias by any means.) If buying DVDs here would do me any good upon returning to the US, I’d get myself a nice collection of Studio Ghibli work. Instead I’ll just have to wait.

2003-04-03T02:55:00.000-08:00

Baseball Fever
Today was the finals for the spring senior high school baseball tournament. All week long on the news, there have been updates about which schools were still in, who had lost, which teams have players with a parent from Iran or Taiwan, how the pitchers match up against each other, and on and on. When the high school tournaments are happening, they get more coverage than any professional sport in Japan. In the semi-finals, one game had to be re-played the next day, because the first time it went into 15 innings and was still tied. Basically, they ended up playing a 24 inning game over the span of two days.

The two teams that made it to the finals were Yokohama SHS and Hiroshima Koryo SHS. Yokohama had been the darling of the news all week, or at least the bilingual version, which might have something to do with the fact that NHK is based in Tokyo, of which Yokohama is basically a suburb. But today, Yokohama just couldn’t do it. I saw the beginning of the game during lunch at school, and their pitcher was having some trouble keeping the ball in the strike zone without the ball getting hit. (The news just now did mention that the strike zone in Japan is smaller than that in the US. Matsui is reported to be having a little trouble with this, playing for the Yankees.) Then I left work early, as I can during these spring holiday days, and by the time I turned the TV on again at home, it was the 8th inning and Koryo was ahead 10-2. The final score was 15-3. Some of the Koryo players were crying for joy, perhaps 3rd year students for whom this was the last game. The Yokohama pitcher was sobbing as he left the field, his hat held over his face. I might cry, too, if I gave up 20 hits to the opposing team, while my own only managed 9. Not that his friends in the outfield were helping much by the end of the game. Two separate players dropped the ball on one play, allowing at least one runner to get home. Poor Yokohama.

SARS
Another big thing in the news right now is the SARS scare. So far, there have been no reported cases in Japan, but people are keeping a close eye on the news. Herby, an ALT from Hong Kong, is very worried. He says he knows people who live a block away from the apartment block that has been quarantined. His girlfriend is coming to visit for a week, and he’s kind of concerned that that’s the length of the standard incubation period. He was going to make sure his apartment was extra-clean, and he says he’s been trying to take a lot of vitamin C, to boost his immune system, just in case. Several other ALTs, such as Kristel, have been going to China and other parts of SE Asia during the spring holidays, and I’m really hoping none of them get sick. Kristel got back last night, so they’re not stopping people from coming back in the country. I did notice that the US held a flight coming in from Tokyo earlier this week to check all passengers and send 4 to the hospital, but they let all the others go. Some Japanese companies with branches in affected areas have told their overseas employees to stay home, rather than expose themselves to more risk than necessary. As for me, I’m not feeling so bad about my decision to put off a possible trip to China. Mysterious deadly pneumonia does not sound like much fun, particularly for my asthmatic lungs. I’d rather stay alive, go to grad school next year, and see the Great Wall later.

2003-03-31T22:47:00.000-08:00

Reason 8 Gazillion and 4, Why I Love Japan
This is a really, really slack week at school, so today Kamiyama-sensei took me for a soba lunch, followed by a trip to Laox. Laox is about to be closed for two or three weeks for renovations, so this was a good time to go. I needed to, really. I had a purpose this time. I needed a card reader for the cards that go in my digital camera, since the main thing that drains its batteries dry is downloading the pictures. This strikes me as really stupid, because card readers don’t even use an external power source, so why having the card read from the camera is so much more of a pain, I don’t know.

Anyhow, Kamiyama-sensei discussed things with the salesman, and I got the right kind of card reader, which is actually what I had picked out as being the right kind the last time I was in there, but the salesman was all concerned about whether it would be compatible with an English OS. This time, though, I actually managed to buy the thing, and what’s more, it was on sale and I had enough points on my Laox card to get it for free.

And what’s the best part? The best part is that then I brought it home, plugged it into the USB port straight out of the box, and it worked. My computer detected it, read the card, and that was it. Why hasn’t the US mastered the art of the USB port yet? This is great stuff.

2003-03-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

Frank Lloyd Wright It’s Not
Lately, I’ve been struck by a number of similarities between the foreign countries I’ve lived in, those being Chile and Japan. They’re really kind of amusing, for countries that one wouldn’t think had anything in common.

Women are fond of jeans so tight they involve Spandex, too much make-up, and a number of interesting fashion statements I wouldn’t make, such as skirts over jeans.

Leather pants are considered a permissible fashion statement for everyone between the ages of 18 and 50.

Guidebooks for both countries insist that the people dress conservatively, without many bright colors. This is a total lie. Sure, when they wear business suits, they wear plain colors, but what other kinds of business suits do they make? When it comes to casual clothes, I’ve seen some eye-blinding combinations, on men and women both. Japanese men in particular seem more inclined to wear brighter colors from all over the rainbow than the average American man. Then again, this may have something to do with the fact that a lot of casual clothing in Japan is unisex. There are advantages to being short and slight in this country.

Both countries are rather earthquake-prone. I’m almost tempted to suspect that my brain has some sort of latent death wish. I’ve become rather accustomed to ground tremors, but have yet to experience a major quake. I do still refuse to live in California, though.

Neither country understands the concept of central heating. Both use space heaters all the time; gas in Chile, kerosene in Japan. Interestingly enough, people in both countries have a mania for winter scarves, too.

Neither country is capable of constructing an attractive city. Both Chile and Japan have rich architectural traditions to draw on, and one can see much beauty in older buildings, but in Santiago and all major cities in Japan, most of the old architecture has been torn down and replaced with the ugliest, most functional, most boring boxes of buildings I’ve ever seen. “Warehouse” seems to be the prevailing stylistic influence, although there are some actual architectural styles at work, which one can mostly discern by the fact that they clash horribly, sometimes within the same building. This is often the case in Japan, where people like adding additions to existing buildings, but rarely try to make the new part match the old in any way, shape, or form. Or color, for that matter. The one nice thing I can say about Japanese cities is that they do make an effort to have greenery, and none are covered with the dome of smog covering Santiago, especially in winter.

2003-03-27T18:20:00.000-08:00

Musical Chairs
When I said that the end of the year was kind of like musical chairs, I was more correct than I knew. This morning, we had the Leaving Ceremony to say good-bye to all the teachers who have been transferred. At Mukaiyama, this was 5 regular teachers, two office workers, and the principal, who is retiring. This afternoon is being entirely devoted to moving all the desks around in the staff room, as all the other teachers change places according to whether they will be teaching first, second, or third year, or whether they will be the head of that grade’s teachers for the year, or perhaps the phase of the moon under which they were born. Everyone else is packing up all their desk stuff, which can be an alarming number of books for such a small space, and pushing them out into the hall so all the desks can be clear before the moving around really starts. No one has told me to move any of my stuff, though, so I think I’ll just sit here.

At the leaving ceremony, I found out the reason the other teachers always call the youngest office worker “the young boy.” He’s actually younger than me. He started working in the school office right after graduating from high school, but has been taking night courses at the university since then. Now he’s quitting to go to school full-time for his junior and senior years. He had to give a speech at the morning staff meeting, along with all the other people who are leaving, and during his speech, the older lady who worked in the office with him was trying to fix a loose thread in his suit jacket hem. It somewhat ruined his bid to look very adult and dignified.

Because the principal is retiring, he had a potter friend make special tea mugs for all of the staff. I got one, too, and they are a lovely greenish-blue color. I thought it was an incredibly nice gesture. I think all the teachers are hoping that the new principal won’t be such a stickler for rules, though. Before the leaving teachers came in to give their speeches at the morning meeting, the vice-principal made a point of saying that we could leave early this afternoon, but that he thought he should say that before the principal got there.

2003-03-26T02:34:00.000-08:00

Transportation
I have determined that the most annoying people in all of Japan are motorcyclists. I’m not talking about people who ride those typically Asian scooters, seen all over Japan and Taiwan, rain or shine, with all sorts of parcels and passengers. I’m talking about true motorcycles, where your legs go on either side. Motorcyclists in Japan seem to take every excuse to rev the engines, and I begin to suspect that they’ve purposefully taken off the mufflers or otherwise horribly mangled the poor things to get such obnoxiously loud noises. In a society so focused on politeness in most interactions, loud motorcycles appear to be a semi-anonymous form of rebellion, and it’s incredibly annoying. Or maybe I just think that because they insist on driving past my apartment at all hours.

In other news, I’ve noticed that no elementary school children ride bikes to school, whereas nearly every highschooler within biking distance does. (This does, of course, mean that I am horribly uncool for walking to work.) Maybe this is because elementary school children live closer to their schools, and thus don’t need to bike, or maybe it’s a safety thing. Or maybe it’s just because. In any case, though, in the past two days, 3 little kids have passed me on my way home from Mukaiyama riding those fold-up scooters, and I’m not referring to the motorized kind this time. I guess those things really are popular somewhere in the world after all.

Birthday Update
There’s an interesting side benefit of having a lot of Brit friends here, and that’s that they all (well, Sharon and Kristel, really) decided to try to Anglicize me for my birthday. From Sharon, I got the swankiest tea bags I’ve ever seen, with real, incredibly fine, cloth tea bags, in the delicious flavor of English Caramel. From Kristel, I got bath gel and perfume of some English brand that both Sharon and Kristel insist is divine. The perfume also came with the warning that I shouldn’t use it before going to work and teaching with all those male JTEs, as it’s touted to inspire “passion.”

Now the only question is, when do I get to go to England?

2003-03-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

Onsening in True Japanese Style
Yesterday after work, I went with the other first-year teachers to a traditional Japanese spa in Fukushima prefecture, which is the prefecture to the south of Miyagi. It was only an hour and a half drive, which makes me laugh when I think about how amazed they all are at the thought of Grinnell being a 16-hour drive from Raleigh. Because Miyagi is surrounded by the strange “odd weather” field, it was actually snowing once we crossed into Fukushima, rather than alternating between snow flurries and warm sun as it had been in Sendai all day. The road up to the onsen, which was up at the top of a mountain, was reminiscent of the 32 switchback pass through the Andes between Chile and Argentina, only on a much smaller scale, which is only appropriate, since it is in Japan. About halfway up, we hit some ice right behind a huge construction truck, which was exciting, but eventually we made it to the onsen itself, at around 6:30 pm.

The onsen is built into the side of a hill, so the reception area is actually on the fourth floor. Our rooms were on the fifth floor, quite conveniently. I was in the room with all the other female teachers, that making a grand total of 4 people in the room. (Japanese teachers, especially in high school, tend to be predominantly male.) We had some tea and relaxed for about 15 minutes before it was time for dinner.

The thing you must understand about this end-of-the-year outing at a traditional onsen is that it wasn’t cheap, so when they served us dinner, they served us Dinner. It was all set up in a large tatami room, with tray tables on the floor set up in a horseshoe. When we came in, we already had so many small dishes of various things, each place had an auxiliary tray, and then they brought in the carp.

Yes, the carp. They brought in two large platters of extremely fresh sashimi. How fresh? The fish were still breathing. Their mouths were opening and closing, all fishy-like, and their gills were expanding. Their tails had been posed artfully up in the air, and the scales places back over their middles, so they appeared mostly whole, against backgrounds of plastic bonsai trees with some sort of vegetable shreds around them, and sliced lemons arranged along the front of the platters. As two of the teachers served the sashimi onto smaller plates, the fish would twitch. As the evening went on, they would occasionally spasm so hard that their tails and fins would move around in the air, and they would knock against the plates. I had a really hard time not laughing out loud when one of them did that while one of the teachers who had been serving was trying to give his requisite speech. The other teachers were highly amused by my fascinated staring, but really, how could I not? It was sitting right there in front of me, and it was certainly something interesting to look at while everyone else was talking to each other in Japanese. I’m not sure they were completely dead yet by the time we left, nearly two hours later.

I’d try to tell about the other kinds of food that we had, but I honestly don’t know what a lot of it was. All of it was, of course, quite artfully presented, as that’s supposedly at least half of Japanese haute cuisine. This does, however, make it hard to figure out if you don’t already know what it’s supposed to be. So you’ll all just have to wonder. I still do, and I ate it.

During the meal, there were the aforementioned speeches. Since this was the end-of-the-year party, each teacher was expected to say what a great time it had been working with all the other people, with anecdotes when appropriate, and if they were leaving for another school in the next year, to say how sad they were to be going somewhere else. Or at least, that’s what I gathered. I was told I’d be going last, I assumed because it would give me time to think of something to say in Japanese.

As it turns out, it was so they could give the kitchen staff time to get a cake ready for my birthday, which I had only just told the other female teachers was on March 22 right before dinner. They apparently quickly conspired with Kamiyama-sensei to get a cake sent at the end of the meal. Poor young Nagane-sensei had been designated the evening’s emcee, and he valiantly made the effort of announcing my birthday surprise in English. Then everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to me, which I think is the one song everyone in the entire world knows in English, no matter their native tongue. And then I got to give my speech. I gave it trilingually, first with some simple, but (I hope) grammatical Japanese, then more complicated bits in English, and then a final “thank you” in Spanish, just to remind them that I’m not a total linguistic moron, despite my lack of fluent Japanese.

After dinner was over, it was time to visit the hot springs. This onsen, being a traditional one, has outdoor pools fed by real natural hot springs. It was amazing to sit in such hot water outside, with snow falling in the light of the moon, just past full, and that of a stone lantern next to a snow covered boulder. Somehow, conversations held in a very poor mix of English and Japanese seem to flow better under such conditions. It was rather awe-inspiring.

The baths were only open until 10, though, so then we got dressed again and proceeded back to the room to put our things away, and then on to the room that had been designated the meeting place for snacks, drinking, and talking. As many ALTs have noticed, teachers become much more willing to speak in English, and in general ask questions or show interest in conversing with the ALT, when they’ve had some alcohol. I think that was the most I’ve ever spoken with any of those teachers. I wonder if any of the effects will last, or if they’ll be back to not wanting to ask me anything again on Monday.

At midnight, though, people dispersed back to their own rooms for sleeping. I’m not actually sure how much sleep I got. I know the other teachers in my room were trying to sleep, but then started talking, and eventually turned on dim lights and had some tea, and I was sort of fading in and out of being asleep and not. Then, the next thing I knew, it was 5:45 am, and they were all getting up again to go to the baths. I declined and elected to go back to sleep. Breakfast was at 8:00, and I intended to sleep until 7:30, but by 7:15, I was up and getting dressed. By 7:45, everyone in our room was packed and ready to go.

We were the first ones to breakfast, but the others showed up soon after. The dining room overlooked the snow-covered hillside, complete with a natural waterfall and a red torii gate. Breakfast was a traditional affair of rice with all sorts of topping kind of things, like stewed mushrooms, pickles, and bamboo shoots (I think). There was also miso soup, a piece of fish, and an egg prepared in some bizarre and icky-looking fashion. (Have I mentioned I don’t really like eggs?) Oh, and green tea.

On the way to the room to get ready to leave, we stopped by the gift shop. All traditional hotels/spas/ryokans in Japan have gift shops, featuring lots and lots of omiyage food items to take to those waiting at home, as well as specific prefectural items. It was here that I found…

Fukushima Kitty-chan! Yes, I did buy another cell phone ornament. They’re such incredibly Japanese souvenirs, and I find it incredibly amusing that each prefecture has a different Kitty-chan. Fukushima Kitty is dressed up as a red ox. She basically looks like she’s wearing red footed pajamas with a hood topped by horns. It’s really cute. Kamiyama-sensei pointed out that I just need Yamagata, Iwate, Aomori, and Akita, and I’ll have all of the Tohoku region, which has just given me terrible, horrible, wonderful ideas, but would probably make my phone clank so much I wouldn’t be able to hear people on the other end. I might try to get at least Yamagata and Iwate, though, since I can get to those prefectures easily, and I’ve actually been there. I’m not going to travel to prefectures just so I can get Kitty-chans, I swear.

Anyway, after I amused everyone with my purchase, we eventually got sorted into cars again, and came back to Sendai. I was back in my apartment before lunch.

2003-03-19T01:46:00.000-08:00

Out of Phase
Slowly but surely, I am figuring out the Japanese school schedule. Unfortunately, it’s usually after the fact, but here’s what I learned today. Today was the last day of school for the year, officially. None of the third year students had to come to school after their graduation ceremony at the beginning of the month, but first and second year students did. At Mukaiyama, classes were only held during the 3 morning periods, before lunch, but at Minami, they had classes all day.

I spent last Friday and this past Monday teaching my last 6 classes of the current batch of Minami first year students. Only some of the classes seemed sad. Others, as usual, stared at me and the JTE as if we were speaking a foreign language, which, of course, we were. They were just supposed to understand it. Oh, well. They’re not my educational struggle anymore. At Mukaiyama, I finished the last of those seemingly never-ending oral exams yesterday.

Kamiyama-sensei’s homeroom class, 1-5, asked me to be in their end-of-the-year class picture, and that was the extent of my professional duties today. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do for the next month or so. I don’t know when the new academic year really starts. We may have the whole month of April off, or it may be that the year starts, but is then interrupted for the Golden Week holidays. These are all things I must remember to tell my successor, so s/he won’t end up with tons of downtime at work, but no vacation days left to take. Things that would have been handy to know, let me tell you. In any case, I guess I’ll just go to work like always, and take my final week of vacation at the beginning of May (Golden Week) like I’ve been planning to anyway.

The other thing that happens when the new year starts, or rather technically, at the end of this month, is that all the teachers get transferred around within the school and the district. The part-time English teacher who sits next to me at Minami is going to a full-time position in Ishinomaki, which will give him a 1.5 hour one-way commute from his home in Shiogama, and he’ll probably stay at that school for 4 years. I don't envy him. At Mukaiyama, the two main third year English teachers will be rotated down to first year, while Mrs. Kasahara and Kamiyama will move up to second year. Also, Mr. Watanabe, the part-time teacher, will be replaced by Ms. Chiba, who had been filling in for the teacher who returned from maternity leave. It’s kind of like musical chairs, and I get the joyous task of learning all new teaching styles to team-teach with.

Some ALTs greatly look forward to this time of year, because the teacher or supervisor who is their bane might get transferred. Others, however, dread it, because the great supervisor who gave them extra vacation or whatever will be leaving. In general, though, it just emphasizes to me how non-sensical the JET year is when put over the Japanese academic year. New JETs arrive in about two-thirds of the way through the first semester of the year, end up with tons of down time slightly over halfway through their contracted year, and basically get paid to sit around doing nothing for two months or so, depending on school and duties, while all the schools complain about how there aren’t enough JETs to go around. Not that I object to the pay, but really, wouldn’t it seem to make more sense to put us on the same schedule as the students, and not pay us for the month or whatever between the end of one year and beginning of the next? I know it’s more convenient for American and British JETs to come and leave in July/August, because that’s how our academic calendars run, but South Africa doesn’t run that way, and, more importantly, neither does Japan. Japan is where we’re working, after all.

In the end, it just puts ALTs even more out of phase with our Japanese colleagues than we have to be. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to make this one less thing making it harder for ALTs to easily fit into the workplace. Why not have new teachers and new students enter the school system at the same time? Instead, we enter just as the new first years have gotten used to their old ALT, and leave just after they’ve gotten used to us. I can’t see that this benefits anyone.

But hey, all this means is that I should use my copious free time writing blog entries to entertain y’all, right? Right. That’s what I thought.

2003-03-16T00:24:00.000-08:00

Innovative Teaching Methods
Yesterday, I got new school shoes to wear at Mukaiyama. When I got here at the beginning of the year, I bought some cheap black tennis shoes, plain and boring, with fold-over tongues that annoy me to death. I finally got tired enough of them to buy new ones, and I have come up with a new teaching strategy.

My new shoes are brilliantly purple Vans. Between these shoes and my neon green ones at Minami, I plan to blind all my students when I walk in the room. That way, they’ll have to concentrate more on their listening skills, as their senses struggle to compensate. It’s all for their educational benefit, really.

They may not want to listen to me, but they’ll sure know I’m there.

None of this has anything to do at all with the fact that owning bright purple shoes amuses me endlessly. I swear.

2003-03-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

Civics Lesson
Today, class, we are going to talk about an issue that I’m sure is weighing on everyone’s mind. Today we are going to talk about what the Japanese think about the US/Iraq situation. Oh, goody!

As noted by the BBC, the government has been extremely vague at home. This is quite true. Every time PM Koizumi says anything in a press conference or otherwise to the news, he emphasizes that Japan is going to wait and see what the other countries, particularly the US and UK, are going to do. To placate the vast majority of Japanese people who are opposed to the idea of a war, (according to NHK news, about 80%) he continually states that Japan will not give military aid, as is required by the post-WWII constitution. Outside Japan, Koizumi expresses a lot of support for the US and UK resolution and emphasizes that the rest of the world should go along as well to show solidarity. Japan is very, very concerned about its relationship with the US.

Personally, I find it rather embarrassing to be an American abroad right now. I’m constantly being asked when the US will be attacking Iraq, why our president wants to attack so badly, do all Americans think it is a good idea, how many Americans think this is a good idea (please give percentages), and is it true that most Americans can’t find Japan on a map? Honestly, I do not have some sort of direct secret American connection to the White House, from which I receive my updates on exactly what the president’s latest thoughts are. I didn’t vote for him, I think he’s a moron, and honest to goodness, I’m not kidding, not all Americans are the same. Really. I know it’s hard to believe but it’s true. Also, the US is a very big country, with many, many people in it, and some of them can’t even find their own state on a map, let alone a country on the other side of the globe.

Most of these questions come from the math teacher a few desks down who likes to practice his English, and I have to try very hard to explain things without big words or sarcasm, which you can imagine, if you know me, is something of a struggle. I’m not really sure he believes me, or understands me, since he tends to ask the same questions over and over, but I’m really trying very hard to present nice, balanced viewpoints. Who knows if it’s working.

White Day Update
Yesterday was White Day. If you recall my earlier entry about it, you will remember that this is the day when boys are supposed to give girls chocolates or cookies in return for what they got on Valentine’s Day. I am sad to report that I did not receive a single chocolate or cookie. Alas and alack.

2003-03-11T00:26:00.000-08:00

Grinnell in Tokyo
This weekend was so much fun! I needed to get out of Miyagi for a bit, and the Grinnell reunion in Tokyo was the perfect thing. This wasn’t an official reunion. It was just a get together for all the Grinnellians Hisako knows in Japan, all in or around Tokyo, except me.

The trip started under a good omen. I managed to get, with the help of Danola’s friend Naoko, really cheap shinkansen tickets. JR East was having a promotional deal for the first 3 weekends in March, so I got a round trip shinkansen ticket, plus free passage on all regular JR trains, for slightly over half of what a regular round trip would have cost. That’s the cheapest trip to Tokyo I’ve ever had.

The train voucher was only good for two days, though, so I went down on Saturday instead of Friday night. I got down there around 1 in the afternoon, and Jamin met me at the station. It was so warm in Tokyo! We walked all over that afternoon, with me just in my sweatshirt. We’re still getting snow in Miyagi. I’ll be glad when the weather stabilizes and really turns into spring.

Jamin still works a crazy schedule at the architecture firm, so we wandered around Tokyo, just talking and getting some coffee in Harajuku until it was nearly time for him to go to work. Yes, it was Saturday in the late afternoon. Yes, he was just going to work. It makes little sense to me or him either. He found it very novel to be out during the daylight hours when other people were around, shopping and enjoying the warm weather. His normal schedule is early afternoon to midnight, and that’s if he goes home early.

Before he went to work, he took me back to his apartment so I would figure out the neighborhood and he could give me the key. He lives in a really nice neighborhood, very trendy. There’s a tree lined street that we came in on, with a Muji and a Gap, which seems a pretentious thing to say, but does provide some measure of how trendy the neighborhood is. Jamin wishes he was awake more during daylight hours, so he could explore more.

After he left, I went out walking for a bit, got myself some dinner, and then watched some of the movies his mom brought him when his parents came for Christmas. I watched “Sweet Home Alabama,” which is a very cute Reese Witherspoon movie, and then “Evita,” which is, in my opinion, too long and quite boring. I may have been a Latin American scholar, but really. At least I can say I’ve seen it now. Anyhow, Jamin doesn’t think he’ll ask his mother to pick movies for him next time. They weren’t all bad or chick flicks, but not really what he would have picked for himself, either.

Just as “Evita” was ending, thank goodness, Jamin came home. We had gotten a call from Hisako earlier saying that the plan was to meet at 9 the next morning, so we should have gone to bed, but instead we stayed up until 2:30 talking and looking at Jamin’s pictures from China and Korea. Eventually, though, we did go to sleep, only to awaken to Jamin’s 4 staggered alarm clocks. He really doesn’t like to get up.

On Sunday morning, we went to Shinagawa station and met Hisako, my Japanese tutor from my second year at Grinnell; her boyfriend Joe, who was in my freshman tutorial on Frank Lloyd Wright; Joe and Hisako’s friend, Jeff, who just moved here in January and works at the international school with Joe; the other Grinnell JET who got here at the same time I did, Steve; Steve’s girlfriend, Yumiko; Jolien, who’s been here teaching English for a year and a half; and Brandon, who studied abroad here and was visiting. Once we were all assembled, we headed off to Kamakura.

Kamakura apparently has a bunch of famous temples, as well as the Daibutsu (“big Buddha”). We couldn’t see all of them, obviously, so we picked two of the best temples, and the Buddha. The first temple we went to was one famous for its bamboo grove. It was so pretty and very peaceful. There weren’t very many people there, and we just wandered the paths among the bamboo, talking and taking pictures. The day wasn’t quite as warm as Saturday had been, but it was still much more pleasant than the Tohoku region is currently, and it was sunny.

After that, we headed back to the main street. We wandered down the street and eventually settled on a soba restaurant for lunch. This being a Grinnell crowd, there were, of course, vegetarians, but none of them put up quite the same fuss as Alex about soba broth being made with fish stock, so ordering wasn’t nearly so much of an ordeal. Then we continued down the street toward the shrine at the end. On the way, we stopped into several shops to look at the lacquer ware for which Kamakura is famous, as well as sampling some little anko pastry things.

I’m not sure why the shrine at the end of the street is famous, but it has some nice bridges and lots of pigeons. There were lots of families with newborns there, several with the babies in christening gowns, although shrines are Shinto. Every time one of the priests would beat on the drum next to the sanctuary, all the pigeons would take off and wheel around until they settled down on the roof again. We went up to a smaller shrine on the nearby hill and took group pictures in traditional Japanese style, except without everyone making a peace sign.

Then it was off to the Daibutsu. This Buddha really is quite large. He’s made of copper, and much like the Statue of Liberty, you can walk around inside him, although we all declined that privilege. He’s sitting down, looking very peaceful, and there was an altar in front of him full of oranges and bananas, and even some bottled water. The Buddha is apparently very health conscious. He also has great big windows in his back, open so the tourists could see out, which was kind of amusing.

From there, we decided to go to the ocean, but on the way, we were distracted by the crepe vendor. They have these crepes all over Japan, and they’re so good. They’ll put just about anything in them, from chocolate and cream with fruit, to pizza toppings or tuna. I got chocolate almond and was not disappointed. The best thing is that it just gets better the further down you eat, because the crepe is warmer and softer and has melted more of the toppings. I’m making myself hungry again.

Eventually we did make it to the ocean, and there were lots of windsurfers out, even though by that point in the afternoon it was feeling rather nippy. The beach wasn’t very spectacular. It was, in fact, rather junky, but whatever. We were just walking around anyway. We made our way back to the train station, where we had some coffee, and then Jamin and I had to leave before everyone else so I could catch a shinkansen back to Sendai in time to sleep before work on Monday.

It was really neat to see so many Grinnell people. Besides Hisako and Joe, I didn’t really know any of the others, but with a school like Grinnell, you can always find people you know in common, and there was much reminiscing about the Perkins in Newton and the Pizza Hut which can never get anyone’s order right, so they’re always giving people free food. I’ll never be able to go back to Grinnell and have it be the same as when I was a student, but there’s always going to be something about a group of Grinnellians. I found myself wanting to speak more Japanese, because these other people were all in the same linguistic boat as me, and they’d get any English words I had to slip in. I came back much happier about the rest of my time in Japan, and ready to travel more, thanks to hearing all their stories about things they have seen and done. I hope Hisako and Joe come up to Miyagi some time, and I’m more inclined to go back to Tokyo myself, to see them and Jamin.

2003-03-06T21:23:00.000-08:00

Cry for Help
In case you've been wondering about my work life lately, the reason I haven't had much to say about it is that it hasn't existed. I haven't had to teach a class in 3 weeks. Wheee, exams. I am also running out of English-language books to read, so I've been trying to ration myself by not bringing books to work. I am totally dependent upon the internet for entertainment. *sigh* Pity me!

Donations of silly mail, real and electronic; books; interesting CDs; and suggestions of fun websites now being accepted.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled staring at the ceiling.

Oh, and just so you don't worry that my life is becoming un-blog-worthy, I'm going to Tokyo for a mini-Grinnell reunion this weekend. I just have to make it through the end of today, and then on Monday, when I once again have no work, I'll have something to write about.

2003-03-04T23:02:00.000-08:00

Visual Aid
For those of you who have just been dying to see what I've been talking about, you may now see an actual picture of the front text of my Ultimate ALT Sweatshirt.

Oooh, aaah, don't we all love digital cameras. And techie boyfriends who will post things to the internet for us, the clueless without real server access. Thank you, Mark. :-)

2003-03-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

Graduation
Yesterday, I got to go to work on a Saturday again. What’s more, I got to walk there in dress clothes and high heels. And for what did I get this pleasure?

Graduation, of course. All high schools in Japan, or maybe just Miyagi, hold their graduation ceremony on March 1. I was at Minami on Friday, so I went to their rehearsal, and then on Saturday I went to the real ceremony at Mukaiyama. One teacher at Minami was very concerned about what I was going to wear, and asked me if I had someone who was going to lend me a kimono. I said, no, I was going to wear a suit, and she looked kind of worried and said that all the women would be wearing kimono. Danola had been told the same thing at her school, to which she replied, “I’m not Japanese, nor do I want to wear a business suit. I’m wearing my sari.” I’m looking forward to hearing how that turned out.

Turns out for me, it was a good thing no one tried to put me in a kimono. I would have looked ridiculous. Not one single female teacher at Mukaiyama was wearing a kimono. Most of them weren’t even wearing particularly formal suits. The first and second year students were all in their usual jeans and sweatshirts, as well. I think Mukaiyama is rather non-conformist on a lot of levels.

The real fashion parade was during the entrance of the graduating third year class, as could be expected. Most of the boys were wearing conventional suits, with only about 6 wearing traditional Japanese formal wear. One boy had on sunglasses and a trench coat, and there were several with freshly dyed hair. The girls were really where the interest was. There were numerous kimono, some with extremely elaborate bows, others with pleated skirts. There were evening gowns. There were business suits. There were diaphanous shawls aplenty, fur stoles, sparkly sweaters, crocheted elbow gloves, high heels, traditional sandals, sneakers, and all sorts of interesting hairstyles, many involving fake flowers and fuzzy clips.

The actual ceremony took much less time than the American version. Each class had a representative who accepted the diplomas for the whole class. The representative went up on the stage, the principal read what the diploma said, handed it to the student, who bowed properly while holding the diplomas up, and then turned and bowed to the teachers and the distinguished guests. The representative would then thank the homeroom teacher in an original way. For example, the representative for class 3-1 had freshly shaved his head for the occasion, leaving only hair in the shape of a giant star on the back of his head, which was dyed a nice strawberry blond. He and another boy did a little skit about falling asleep in class. 3-2 gave their teacher a rugby ball which they had all signed. 3-3 serenaded their teacher. 3-4 gave their teachers diplomas. And so on.

After that, the principal gave a speech, in which he seemed to basically give a list of all the significant world events that happened in the last 3 years. (He is not known for his great speech-giving abilities.) Then there was a speech by some random dignitary from the bunch that had filed in at the beginning. No one ever told me who they were. Then a representative from the remaining student body gave a speech, and then the graduate representative gave one. Then they sang the school song and something else, maybe the national anthem, and then I went to stand outside in the freezing cold and applaud as all the students left again.

An interesting thing was the reaction of the students to the return of the substitute teacher who had been filling in for the teacher who was out on maternity leave. The substitute, who was at Mukaiyama for the first 5 months I was here, graduated from Mukaiyama as well, and was treated by many of the third year girls as a sempai, which is kind of like, um, an upper classman at military school or something. Your superior and friend, in general terms. Anyhow, she was like a returning celebrity. The rumor is that she’s going to come back in the new semester and take the place of the part-time English teacher, which would be good, because I don’t like him that much.

I really don’t understand the Japanese school year schedule. Even though we had the graduation ceremony, there’s still at least 2 weeks of school left to teach this semester. Then there’s the closing ceremony, and a week later, the leaving ceremony for the teachers who are getting transferred. When the new school year starts isn’t entirely clear to me, but I think it’s at the beginning of April. I suppose I’ll find out when it happens, as always.

2003-02-27T22:16:00.000-08:00

Cultural Enrichment
Last night I went to a modern dance performance here in Sendai. By myself, even. See? I can get out of the house on my own, I swear. Anyway, a few weeks ago I got a flyer on my desk about the performance and I got Kamiyama-sensei to call and reserve me a ticket.

The performance was by Kim Itoh + the Glorious Future, and I thought it was really neat. There’s something about going to a dance performance that seems to be the same all over the world. I’m not really sure what it is, but all auditoriums hosting a modern dance performance have pretty much the same feel. The auditorium at the Asahigaoka Civic Center even looked like the ones at Duke where ADF is held. (That’s American Dance Festival, for those who aren’t up on their modern dance knowledge.) The national theater in Santiago felt the same way, on a larger scale, when I went to see Pilobolus in Chile. It’s such a comfortable feeling, like everyone there belongs to some small world of artistic appreciation, no matter their everyday life.

Back to the performance. The thing that really struck me, from the very beginning of the performance all the way to the end, was that it incorporated what is quite possibly the most innovative use of light I’ve ever seen. It played an integral part in the staging of the dance, the division of the stage, even the levels the dancers danced at, by which I mean whether they were down near the floor or jumping in the air. The light was more integral to the performance than the music was, which is a rare thing.

It was also probably the longest single-piece performance I’ve ever seen. There were no breaks in the entire hour. It was amazing to watch. Kim Itoh was alone on the stage for maybe 20 minutes before any of the other dancers ever entered the stage, and he didn’t stop moving the whole time. Most of the movement used was very spastic, like robots shorting out, but just when you got used to one kind of movement, they’d switch to another, and just as suddenly, they’d be moving normally. Dancers are so amazing to watch, the way they have such control over their bodies. The movement in this piece was so different from what one typically sees that it absorbed all of my attention, distracting from the fact that it wasn’t trying to tell any kind of coherent story. I wish I knew what the title of the piece meant.

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. I wish I could afford ADF tickets more often.

2003-02-25T15:59:00.000-08:00

Popcorn
I have finally seen my first theater movie here in Japan. Saturday was the opening day of “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.” I’m sure that this doesn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but there are several factors to take into account in this case.

1) When I was in Chile, I saw movies in the theater almost every other week. It became a large part of my abroad experience. I got used to seeing just about every movie that came out, if it looked even remotely interesting. There are still movies that I have a hard time remembering the names of in other than Spanish. Tickets were less than $2, there was a doughnut counter and an ice cream counter. (Note on Chilean ice cream: it’s actually gelato, they have more flavors than you can imagine, the smallest serving is two scoops, and they look at you funny if you want both scoops to be the same flavor. Trips to the movies also became ice cream flavor experiments.) All theaters had stadium seating, with air conditioning and heating, as Chile, like here, didn’t believe in household temperature control. I still have all the ticket stubs. They take up two pages in my scrapbook.

2) Going to the movies in Japan, on the other hand, is a production. Tickets cost $12. You have to buy your tickets for assigned seating. You can pick your seats as you would for a theatrical performance. They have caramel popcorn. Also, the theater is not a 10-minute walk from my house, but instead at the next-to-last stop on the subway line, in the 4th through 6th floors of The Mall.

3) It’s Lord of the Rings! What more do I need to say? Although liberties may have been taken with the books, these movies are absolutely gorgeous. Besides, I only ever read the books in Spanish anyway, so I’m not going to get all picky the way true fans do.

So, yeah, I was really excited to go see this movie. Three hours passed so quickly. After it was over, even the two people in our group of 5 who hadn’t cared at all about seeing it were impressed. I entertained them all with random movie facts, such as they had a bank of white Christmas lights strung up off camera which they only turned on when filming Cate Blanchett, which is why her eyes always look all extra elf-sparkly. Yes, I did see the extended DVD version of the first movie. Yes, all of my friends who own it are geeks who regaled me with such random facts from the special features section. Yes, I am quite comfortable with my geekiness. Why do you ask?

If this is the one movie I see in a theater in Japan, it was worth it.

PBS Enforcers
NHK finally found me. After living in Japan for 7 months without having to pay for my television service, they finally realized someone lives in my apartment. Phooey. I don’t feel that bad about it, since I did get away with it for so long, and it’s not that much, about $10/ month.

What’s NHK? NHK is sort of like the Japanese version of PBS. They have lots of educational shows and the bilingual news, among other things. It’s not really free, though. Instead of the begging month, they send out collectors directly to people’s apartments. When you pay them, they put a little NHK sticker on your door so other collectors won’t bug you because you’ve already paid.

They’re very organized. Most other collectors or advertisers who have come to my door went away quickly when I just looked confused at them. This guy, though, had brochures in 4 different languages and seemed very practiced in patiently getting people to understand him, all while being very friendly. It seemed worth it to pay him. I wonder what would happen if PBS found out about this system, though.

2003-02-23T03:18:00.000-08:00

Mujer florero
I want a Japanese girlfriend! It’s not fair. Boys come to Japan and pick up Japanese girlfriends who teach them to cook properly, and I get stuck with old female teachers who all insist they don’t know how to cook very well, they couldn’t possibly teach me.

What brings on this rant, you ask? It’s that on Friday night I went to dinner at Richard’s, and his girlfriend, Keiko, made udon with mushrooms and broth. Japanese cooking looks so easy! I know I could do it, if I just had a clue what all that stuff was that she put in the pot and stirred together. I think I even have a bunch of it in my kitchen already, I’m just not sure what to do with it when not faced with a specific recipe.

Keiko is very nice, and quite fluent in English. She is studying to be a nurse, and in fact has her qualifying exams this weekend. She was the school nurse at Richard’s girls’ school during August, I assume filling in for the regular nurse. She has a twin sister, and I’m wondering if I could recruit her to come and be my Japanese housewife.

(Incidentally, that’s basically what mujer florero means, “housewife,” in Spanish. I just heard the song by that name, and it seemed appropriate.)

Richard is from South Carolina, and although he doesn’t have any more of a Southern accent than I do, we teamed up to teach Keiko how to speak horrible Southern English. In return, she taught us a little bit of Sendai-ben, but in my experience, accents are much easier to distinguish when one is more fluent. It was an entertaining evening.

Baseball Fever
I’m betting that the job everyone in Japan wishes they had right now is that of the NHK reporter who is doing an in-depth report on the various Japanese baseball players currently in spring training in Tampa, Florida. She always looks very pleased with herself as she greets all of us freezing cold people in her light blouse from in front of the baseball stadium under the Florida morning sun. I certainly envy her job right now.

Just to prove how obsessed the Japanese are with their American team baseball stars, Matsui has been the highlight of all sports news for weeks now. The other night, they devoted 5 whole minutes of the half hour news broadcast to the fact that Matsui wore sunglasses for the first time at practice. They also showed footage of him almost running into a teammate while trying to catch a ball in the outfield, for which the comment was, I swear, “It was probably because of the sunglasses.”

Matsui is, for those of you who don’t know, the latest player drafted for the NY Yankees, and is primarily a power hitter. In Japan, he played mostly night games, so getting used to the “bright Florida sun” is an anticipated problem. Very few people in Japan wear sunglasses, supposedly because it’s a sign of belonging to the yakuza, but I’m not sure how true that is. I still don’t think it deserved 5 minutes on the news.

2003-02-18T23:39:00.000-08:00

In the news…
I’ve been having an interesting time watching the news lately. These past two days have been the days of Korea, mainly for Kim Jong Il’s birthday. The Japanese bilingual news (which is just the regular news dubbed over) had footage straight from North Korea, showing the same stuff all the national networks over there were broadcasting. Very 1950’s Cold War style celebrations of his time in office, clips of him touring military barracks, exhorting the troops to do their best, interspersed with red title screens, and backed by uplifting “let’s go conquer some nations” music. All the while, a Korean-speaking Japanese person was dubbing over the narration into English. I’m sorry to say it didn’t occur to me until too late that I should start counting the number of times they said the phrase “the Great Leader.” It was very strange, in a time-warp kind of way.

Also, I learned how to make a big snow hut, a la the ones in Sapporo for the snow festival. You can make little ones, too, with buckets to pack the snow in, then dump it out, make a hollow, and then put a candle in it. The big ones for people are made in exactly the same way, on a much larger scale, and then instead of a candle, people make snow shelves, put in carpeting, a table, and a heater of some sort. Most of the people manning the traditional snow huts were students from a local high school, at least for this news story.

Speaking of Sapporo, according to the weather report a day or so ago, I’m really glad I don’t live in Hokkaido. One of the more northern cities on that island had a low of –23 C. Personally, I think it’s plenty cold in Sendai, but I hear they actually insulate their houses and use double-paned glass further north. I’m sure Sendai is still warmer.

Technological Advances
For those of you I haven’t already complained to about this, my BOE (Board of Education) has done something really annoying. They “upgraded” their server a week and half ago. I’m not really sure what this accomplished, as it certainly doesn’t run any faster, but in doing so, they also installed a new piece of software called Net Filter. Before, the proxy server that all the high schools ran their LANs off of blocked questionable sites, which was understandable and all that, but now they’ve just gone overboard. Now, any computer connected through the proxy server cannot access free email providers, such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Since all ALTs use either one of these or another like them, none of us can access our email at work anymore. I find this exceptionally annoying, as I was compensating for the fact that no one can get my computer hooked up to the network printer by emailing all the necessary files to Kamiyama-sensei and getting him to print them for me. With the final exam coming up, for which I am supposed to write the listening portion, this is a problem.

When I told Kamiyama-sensei about it, he found a solution. Not a solution that allows me access to my email, of course, but at least he can get the exam from me. Ever increasing the number of things that can plug into the USB port on my laptop, he handed me an external hard drive on a key chain. Seriously. It’s tiny. All I have to do is plug it in, save my files to it, unplug it, and give it back to him to plug into his computer. No discs that might get corrupted, no horribly slow email transfer, just hand him the hard drive. Spiffy!

As for the email issue, I got elected the unofficial ALT technology representative, since I’m the only one amongst our group who even knows what a proxy server is, let alone what it does and why it’s being a pain. I emailed Kristin, the liaison for ALTs to the JET bureaucracy, and she said that they had no idea that free email sites were being blocked until ALTs started telling them. They’re looking into it and will get back to us, which means that maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to access email from work again before I leave Japan in 5 months. I find this whole thing kind of ironic, since all JET business is conducted via Yahoo accounts.

(And just to round out my griping, not that any of you care, I will point out that all my IT friends have said there’s no good reason for them to do this. If they want to restrict traffic on the server to speed things up, they’d block actual sites, not email access. If they’re worried about email virii, they should install virus protection, rather than blocking email accounts that automatically scan every attachment you try to open, whether you want them to or not. If they’re concerned that people are wasting time at work sending personal email, they need to give ALTs more to do. Personally, I haven’t had a single class to teach for 3 days. I wrote the listening portion of the exam in about half an hour. The most productive thing I’ve done is write this blog entry, and now that it’s done, I’m going back to knitting. Wheeeee, final exams, when Oral Communication is most definitely not a priority class.)

Random Japanese Fact
Before I forget, one random Japanese fact for today. They have blackboard eraser vacuums here. I’m not kidding. They’re little boxes with a depression in the top for you to run the eraser back and forth over, with a little vacuum slit opening that cleans off all the chalk dust. That rather takes the fun out of clapping the erasers.

2003-02-15T03:40:00.000-08:00

English Camp
Where have I been this past week? Why, I've been at English camp! What’s English camp? Oh, that’s right, you’re not here, you don’t know what I’m talking about.

As you might recall, I mentioned that my base school, Mukaiyama, has a special math and science track. At Izumi SHS, they have the same kind of thing for English. They have two classes worth of students (80) who get twice as much English instruction as everyone else, and at the end of the first year students’ first year (okay, that sounds redundant, but it gets the idea across) they have an intensive English camp, for which they spend 2.5 days in a hotel with a bunch of ALTs and some other English teachers. Izumi has been running this camp for 8 years now, so they’ve got it pretty well organized.

There were 8 ALTs there. Two of them work at Izumi, Simon M. and Cindy, and they were the ones that contacted the rest of us and asked us if we would help out. In the end, the cast consisted of Simon Martin (UK), Cindy (USA), Danola (SA), Sharon (UK), Catherine (Wales), Simon Tipping (New Zealand), Alex (USA), and me. Each of us were assigned a group of about 10 kids to help in individual group time, by correcting compositions, preparing them for the speech contest, helping them practice their drama, and correcting the grammar in their nightly diaries. Just to prove that I can remember names if I see students often enough, my kids were Shou Sugiyama, Shou Seino, Sou, Ryouta, Ayano, Kaoru, Satomi, Tomoe, and Rie. Aren’t you impressed?

Day One
On the first day, we arrived at the hotel in the morning and met in the large tatami room for the opening ceremony. The Japanese really, really like opening and closing ceremonies. It wasn’t very exciting, and was mostly conducted by Mr. Tadano, who technically speaks English, but mostly manages to confuse everyone. He also ended all assemblies by informing everyone that they could use the ensuing break to “Go to the bathroom.” While I’m sure this was useful information, it’s not usually phrased as a command. Anyhow, then we broke into our small groups and met our students for the first time. I think I speak for all the guest ALTs when I say, wow. It’s quite a change to work with students 1) in small groups, who are 2) enthusiastic and 3) actually willing to try and speak English.

After the introductions were over, we moved to our small group rooms and the students prepared for the preliminary speech contest. I walked around and corrected grammar in the written compositions. When they felt they were ready, each one gave his or her speech for the group. I had to pick two finalists to go to the final speech contest. Three students wrote about Japanese traditional holidays, one about tigers being endangered and what we can do to help them, one about getting his dog (“She chases her tail. I think she is lonely. She pretends her tail is another dog.”), and one about the necessity of clothes and fashion. (There were two more, but I can’t remember them now.) My finalists were Sou, with the tigers, and Ayano, on the Tanabata festival in Sendai.

After lunch, the groups competed in quiz games about South Africa, New Zealand, Britain, and the US. I was Cindy’s assistant in the American quiz room. We ran the quiz four times, with two groups competing each time and then rotating to the next room. Each team had two representatives answering questions for them. I wish I could say that the students had a blast in our room, but they really didn’t. Cindy has some good ideas and spent a lot of time helping with the organization of the camp overall, but really, she’s not so good at implementing said ideas, and she was totally unprepared for running the quiz. This was not my favorite 4 hour period. And really, how could she compete with Simon T., who was demonstrating the traditional haka dance of New Zealand, which the national rugby team performs before every match to get pumped up? The haka became kind of a theme for the rest of the camp.

After the quizzes, we went to the final speech contest. My kids did not win. The content of their speeches was good, but their delivery had nothing on the kids who came in in the first three places. The boy who won spoke about what happens to abandoned animals and how he feels that animal cruelty should get harsher penalties. The contest was followed by dinner, a movie for the kids, and general socializing for the ALTs. The students had to turn in their nightly diaries by 9 pm, so we corrected those before going off to sleep.

Day Two
On the second day, after breakfast we were treated to a song extravaganza by the students, kind of like a big group karaoke presentation that they’d been practicing for weeks. They were all English songs, of course, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what they all were. I do remember there were two Beatles songs, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (how Suzuki method), and one group performing on recorders. However, they finished too quickly and Mr. Tadano made the ALTs get up and sing, too. I hate karaoke culture. And it’s not like everyone knew the words to “You Are My Sunshine” off the top of their heads. I had to teach it to Alex in about 30 seconds. Bleh.

But then we escaped off to our group rooms again, after being told to go to the bathroom, to have writing activities. Each of the students had brought an item for show and tell and got half an hour to write a script to present it. My kids had a hip hop CD, soccer shin guards signed by his teammates, his first Japanese/English dictionary (the first word he ever looked up was “garden”), manga books about a baseball player (all the characters have names starting with “H,” hence the title H2), a ring, a necklace, a Snoopy key chain, and um, something else that I don’t remember. After that, we were supposed to teach them a bit about Valentine’s Day, and I told them they could make one for everyone in the room or make one for a famous person, (ex: David Beckham, Britney Spears.) Most of them opted for the “make one for everyone” option.

After lunch, we got to the best part of the camp! At least, for me it was. It was time for foreign language classes! I was teaching Spanish; Sharon, Italian; Catherine, French; and Alex, Chinese. Like the quiz games, we had two groups worth of students in each of four rotating sessions. Each session lasted 25 minutes. My lovely assistant was Simon M., who was quite excited at the prospect of remembering the Spanish he had picked up in Spain 8 months ago, but has since forgotten with all his Japanese. The kids seemed to really like the class, and I was pleased with my organizational skills. 25 minutes was just enough time to teach them a very simple self-introduction without making them repeat things too many times or lose interest. Class went like this:

Students entered the room with Spanish music playing from my computer. After they got settled, I welcomed them in Spanish and then had a short “Hello, Simon! How are you?” conversation, followed by “Eso es como hablar en español. ¿Alguién entiende lo que nosotros decimos?” I then repeated that in English: “This is how to speak Spanish. Does anyone understand what we said?” After the expect blank looks, I said, “Well, the first thing I said was ¡Hola! What does this mean?” Because I was waving my hand while saying it, someone would say “Hello” and we’d go from there. In the end, I taught them hello, good morning, good afternoon, good night, I am called…, I am from…, How are you?, I’m fine, I’m not well, the numbers 1-20, I am ___ years old, yes, no, please, thank you, and right at the end, good-bye. Ta-da, 25 minutes gone!

The rest of the afternoon was given to drama practice, for which there was too much time allotted and I let my kids out early. The girls asked me to come talk to them in their room, which I did, and it was neat to talk to them. They, of course, asked me questions about Mark, is he nice, is my ring an engagement ring, etc, etc. I explained to them that engagement and wedding rings go on the other hand, and this one was just a present. There was much excited discussion, and then a dictionary was brought out to find the word “envious.” It became the word of the discussion. They also went to get an MD player that could clip into speakers and played some Exile for me, one of the numerous boy bands here. I taught them to spell their names in American Sign Language, which was a big hit. They even remembered how to do it the next day.

Then was dinner, another movie, onsen (hot spring) for me and Danola, and socializing with diary correction, once again.

Day Three
On the final day, we got up and packed up our stuff. We trundled it all down to the main tatami room, put it in the back of the room, and settled down for the drama presentations. I was one of the judges for this. Each of the groups had been practicing a drama for a month before the camp. My group had The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Others were The Grateful Buddhas, Momotaro, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, The Ants and the Grasshoppers, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Three Little Pigs. These kids had put a lot of time into planning for the dramas. There were costumes, sets, music, props, everything. For my group, the Piper was Shou Seino and there was much discussion of what he should play on his recorder to lead the mice and children out of Hamelin. He offered “The Sound of Silence,” the Indiana Jones theme song, and “Doe, a Deer.” In the end, “Doe, a Deer” won out, but in the meantime we were all entertained during practice by lots of piping. The other judges really liked it because several of my boys were real hams (how can you go wrong with a first line of “Ow! How savage! Ooooo…”), and the girls playing the mice did a good job of drowning in the river. Honestly, they did a really good job, better than they had in practice, so even I was quite impressed, and I’d already seen it 6 times.

The Pied Piper tied with The Grateful Buddhas for second place, after Momotaro, which won mostly for flawless presentation. However, among the students, I think the favorite was Hansel and Gretel, with the winner of the speech contest cross-dressed as Gretel. He even did a little jump for joy with a girlish squeal at the end, when they reunited with their father.

Then we had picture taking, another favorite Japanese activity. Somehow, we still managed to end that early, so for the hour before lunch we just chatted with our students. My boys went off to do gymnastics in the back of the room after distributing their Valentines, and my girls and some of their friends sat and talked to me, interspersed with lots of individual picture taking. At one point, several of them were petting my hair and saying how soft it was. Because my nice, fine, soft hair also sheds everywhere, I later had Rie come up to me and show me one of my hairs, saying she had found it in her pocket, and could she keep it? I told her sure, it was a present, and she looked absurdly happy. After lunch and the short closing ceremony, Kaoru and Satomi came to say good-bye and actually gave me hugs, looking close to tears. They’re all so cute!

We ALTs got on the city bus back to the station, while the kids got on the group bus, and they waved at us out the windows the whole time.

2003-02-14T20:55:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day Update
Okay, this is just for clarification. When I said that many female ALTs in Japan think the exclusive only-girls-to-boys aspect of Valentine's Day here is unfair, I wasn't really meaning that I felt that way. Personally, I just think it's rather weird. I mean, it's not like the rest of Asia is like this, at least not according to this article from the BBC. It's just Japan.

Anyhow, I spent the past 3 days around Danola, who has been rather depressed about the prospect of spending this Valentine's Day single in Japan, where she can't even expect pity presents from male friends, and thus, I was representing her rather forceful opinion, rather than my own, since I don't really have one. For the record, in past years I have only ever gotten Valentine's Day presents from my parents, grandparents, and platonic friends. I have strategically managed to live out of the country both times I've been dating anyone during this holiday, which hinders the gift-giving. So, yes, I know that in most other countries around the world, men give humongously more than women do. I have even been sent links to statistics to prove it. I believe you, I really do! That wasn't my point.

My point was, as always, Japan is weird and we should be amused. Oh, and that you should all send me chocolate-covered marshmallows next month.

2003-02-14T02:37:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine’s Day
As an actually timely entry, I thought I’d tell you how Valentine’s Day is celebrated in Japan. It seems marvelously unequal to gaijin from the Western world, or at least, to the women. Here in Japan, only girls profess their love (or whatever) to boys, in the form of chocolates. Boys don’t give girls anything. No cards, no flowers. They don’t really even have to acknowledge the girls’ feelings until a month later, March 14, which is White Day. On White Day, boys are supposed to give girls chocolate-covered marshmallows. According to my JTEs, this holiday is purely an invention of candy companies.

To even things up, all of us ALTs made our classes at the English camp (update forthcoming) celebrate the holiday “the American/British/South African/New Zealand way.” I made my kids make a Valentine for everyone in our group. I got 5 Valentines today, 3 from girls and 2 from boys. Awwww…

Loose Socks Update
As you may remember, I said that it was the fashion for high school girls here to wear really baggy, scrunched socks that end halfway up their shins with their uniform skirts. Today, I found out that they actually glue the tops of these “loose socks” to their legs. They have special roll-on glue and everything. My students asked me if I wanted to wear them. I told them I think they look better on students.

2003-02-10T00:27:00.000-08:00

Self Defense Lesson
We’ve all heard about how safe Japan is, especially compared to all those other countries, like, say, New York. (What? Are you serious? There’s actually more in the United States besides New York? I had no idea.) In the main, this is true. I never feel worried here, walking home from downtown Sendai at night or taking the late train back from Shiogama. Men don’t even openly leer at me in the streets, the way they did in Chile. This isn’t to say they’re not covertly leering, but really, after Latin America, my standards for the amount of leering I’ll tolerate have been rather changed.

Back to the point. If I feel safe here in Japan, coming from the crime-ridden streets of suburban North Carolina and small town Iowa, the contrast for Danola, from Johannesburg, South Africa is truly huge. Her house in South Africa had an electrified gate and fence, and was basically in a walled compound, and she wasn’t particularly upper-class, either. So, after 6 months of life in Japan, her guard has dropped quite a bit.

This is why she was so freaked out when a guy followed her home last weekend. It doesn’t happen very often, but often enough that female JETs are warned about it. We stick out, we are objects of curiosity, we sometimes attract interest we don’t want, particularly from men late at night who have been out after work drinking with their colleagues. Danola was walking home from Sharon’s apartment, which is maybe a 15-minute walk, and some man started following her. Her reconstruction of the conversation was that he said he was from China and trying to ask directions, to which she responded she didn’t speak Japanese. She tried to make him go away before she went up the stairs to her floor of the apartment building, but he followed her up and asked if he could come into her apartment. Fortunately, she was standing in front of Alex’s window and announced in a loud voice that she was going to get her neighbor, because he spoke better Japanese, so Alex saved her. When he opened his window and said the guy could come into his apartment to ask his questions, the man said no, no, he would come back later and talk to Danola. She went to school the next day and reported it to her principal, who took her to the police station to report it there. Now she doesn’t open the door unless her visitors can speak English and identify themselves, and is reluctant to go out at night.

My response to this was to go to Shiogama on Saturday and teach Danola and Kristel some simple self-defense techniques. I taught them what to do if someone grabbed their wrists, shoulders, or necks, or grabbed them from behind. They won’t have a lot of opportunity to practice these things, but Danola said they were simple and logical enough that she thought she’d be able to do them in an emergency anyway, even if it’s not second nature yet. She said she felt better now having some idea of what to do at all, because at the time, she felt helpless at the thought of what might have happened if he had tried to actually touch her. I’m glad I was able to give her at least a little bit more confidence again. It made me realize that I haven’t ever been in a situation where I would be that scared of being attacked. I started taking karate when I was 11, and I really do think it has changed my entire life. I’m glad.

2003-02-08T22:56:00.000-08:00

A Tomb for Fireflies
On Friday night, I actually initiated human contact and got out of the house. I’m so impressed with myself. I went downtown with Richard, of whom I haven’t seen much since he got a Japanese girlfriend. We went to McDonalds to replenish the grease and salt deficit in our diets, got coffee, of course, and then Richard rented DVDs, since he actually bought a DVD player that can play Region 2 (or whatever region Japan is in) DVDs. He’s become a big fan of watching Japanese movies with the English language option, such as “Princess Mononoke,” and “Spirited Away,” just to name two of the most famous recent anime movies. Of course, our movie picking in the anime section was mostly based on the cover art, and we ended up with (translated) “A Tomb for Fireflies.”

We had no idea what it was about. Turns out, it’s a gorgeously drawn and animated movie about two kids orphaned during WWII, sent to live with their mean aunt who doesn’t feed them so they move into a cave to live on their own, and in the end die of malnutrition. In true Japanese style, it seemed to end in the middle of the plot, and was just very, very weird. No one in the American tradition would ever have thought of making this story into an animated movie. We just sat there blinking at the screen through the credits, trying to figure out exactly what it was we had just watched, and what we were supposed to think about it.

2003-02-08T21:08:00.000-08:00

Engrish Hunt
In my efforts to cheer myself up in the long, cold days of the season that is winter in Japan, I have been indulging in consumer therapy, egged on by the cheap prices at Uniqlo. I realized this, and felt somewhat dismayed at the amount of clothes I am suddenly inclined to buy. In the past week, though, I have discovered a way to prevent myself from buying lots of winter clothes that will be too hot for my future life back in the land of proper indoor heating. This new strategy is in the form of a grail hunt.

I am now on the quest to find the perfect Engrish clothing items. The beauty of this is they tend to be cheap.

Last weekend in Uniqlo, on the Y1000 shelf, I found a t-shirt that says “Form Follows Funkiness.” I was quite pleased with this. It amuses me greatly, and is actually grammatical while being totally bizarre.

However, yesterday I far surpassed that shirt in perfection. For a mere Y500, I found, in the Jusco in Shiogama, the ultimate ALT sweatshirt. It proclaims, in huge letters across the back, “Greet People with a Big Smile and a Clear Voice.” On the front, it says the same thing in smaller letters, prefaced by “Go One’s Way. (bigger letters) Way. (underneath slogan, between stars) Happy.” And then there’s a drawing of an astronaut. No, I have no idea why. It’s just Japan. Come on, laugh. I’m working on a way to get to wear it to school.

2003-02-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

The Perfect Woman
During my famous Valentine’s Day lesson, mentioned two entries ago, the students have to interview each other about “Who is the Perfect Man or Woman?” according to the example sentence “Is it important that s/he is…?” with the possible answers of Yes, No, and Sort of. There follows a list of 13 qualities with which to fill in the blank: Handsome/Beautiful, Rich, Honest, Intelligent, Funny, Friendly, Romantic, A good cook, Hard-working, Adventurous, Enjoys traveling, Comes from a good family, and Other.

They are instructed to be creative and put down anything they want for Other. Some example answers are taller, shorter, kind, younger, older, long hair, short hair, sportsman, gentleman, quiet, nice body, strong, likes insects (the boy who put that one down is very quiet and shy), etc. You get the idea.

After they finish interviewing each other, they exchange papers and rank these qualities in order of importance, 1 being most important. I spend a lot of time walking around the room making sure they’re using English, remember to put something down for Other, and understand the ranking. In doing this the other day, I noticed a kid who had checked in the “no” column all the way down except for his Other quality. My first thought was that he had just cheated to be done faster and get to goof off for the rest of the time, which is not terribly unusual. When I actually got over to his desk, though, I saw what his Other quality was, and laughed out loud.

There, written in nice, clear, printed English, he had written “living.”

He had, of course, ranked that quality as #1. Anything else was just considered gravy. At least he had his priorities straight.

2003-02-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

A Mid-Year Reflection
or, Why the JET Programme Isn’t Effective

All this week, I have been giving up my lunch periods and staying late after school to administer individual oral pronunciation tests. Every 2-3 minutes, I go through the same routine again and again. I say:

“For the first part, I will say a word two times, and you should circle which word you hear.”

I then say one word of a minimal pair. (ex: light/right, think/sink, bolt/volt) There are 5 pairs. Then I say:

“For the second part, you should read the sentences out loud.”

There are 4 sentences involving minimal pairs, including the famous “She sells seashells by the seashore.” (No, I’m not evil. They can try as many times as they want to, as slow as they want, and I grade really leniently, based on whether they are really trying to differentiate the sounds.)

Very few students get everything right.

I also spent a lot of time yesterday grading the translation part of an exam. Students were given Japanese sentences and expected to translate them into grammatical English. For example, one target sentence was “She shared her apple(s) with her (younger) brother.” I got many answers, many switching “her” with “my,” others not getting the first possessive at all (“what her had an apple”), and of course, some people sharing their brothers with their apples. While this is amusing, it’s also depressing. These students are all finishing their fourth year of compulsory English. Many of them cannot produce grammatical English beyond, “Hello, how are you? I am fine.” They cannot come close to understand the entirety of a simple conversation, if the participants are speaking at normal speed. Under the current level of English education, they never will be able to. Kamiyama-sensei pointed out that by the time the average Japanese person graduates from college, s/he has had between 7-10 years of required English, yet English majors are the only ones who can actually speak or understand it.

When I took the class titled “Latin America and the US” in my final semester at Grinnell, we read a book looking at the impact of various US foreign policy programs, one of which was the Peace Corps. The author noted that though many Peace Corps volunteers came back talking about what a powerful experience it had been for their lives, when one looked at the original aims of the program, it could be seen that the program as a whole was failing. This strikes me as an accurate description of the JET program as well. The aim of the JET program is to have native speakers present in the classroom in order to encourage students to see English as a living, useful language, as well as produce more fluent speakers of English. This is not happening.

The theory behind the JET program is sound. I have seen extremely effective native/non-native speaker team teaching. The native speaker provides an innate understanding of grammar and sounds, and offers the students an example of easy fluency to serve as a goal, as well as someone with whom they can converse. The non-native speaker possesses an understanding of the problems the students face in acquiring the target language, since s/he has already gone through the same process. S/he can offer the students more in-depth explanations that they can relate to their own lives and native language.

Unfortunately, this does not happen with the average JET program ALT’s teaching experience. That sort of team teaching requires the native speaker to have a frequent presence in the classroom, really, no less than 2-3 times a week, at a minimum. The teachers should know each other well and have good rapport. Instead, ALTs are spread rather thin in Japan. I teach at two schools, with 10 different teachers, in a total of 20 classes, visiting each class only once every 2 weeks. I know none of my students names. My teaching style is constantly in flux. Each teacher has a different way s/he wants to make use of me, at least one of which is not at all. My classes are labeled “Oral Communication,” and not really treated as an important part of the curriculum at all. Some teachers view me as an interruption in their imparting a stream of grammar into their students’ minds, others view me as the students do, as an entertaining class with little substance. It is a constant struggle to get them to speak in English at all.

I just this morning filled out the form stating that I do not intend to re-contract for the next year. This has been my intention all along, as I plan to go to grad school next year, but I suspect that even if that was not the case, I would not really want to re-contract anymore. Living in Japan is great, but this job is unfulfilling. I am not making the impact on these students that I know I could, and it frustrates me beyond belief. Perhaps I was too qualified for this position, as I have too much educational theory behind me, letting me know I’m doing a bad job. I will come back from Japan with a great year of personal experience, and having absolutely not accomplished the intended goal of my professional position.

2003-02-05T03:35:00.000-08:00

Star-crossed lovers
Okay, not really, but it was the phrase the popped to mind. Since it’s February, I’m teaching a bunch of lessons on Valentine’s Day. (As a side note, by the time I leave Japan, I will know the origins of every American holiday, so just ask me if you want to know the story of Halloween, Valentine’s Day, etc.) Anyway, at the end of my Valentine’s lesson, I talk about what Valentine’s is like in the United States, have the JTE compare it to Valentine’s in Japan, and then open the floor to questions. Here comes the point of this entry. I’ve gotten this question twice now.

“Are you going to give your lover a gift?”

Yes, in English, even, so I have to praise their efforts. But really, being asked about my “lover” by high school students, and their teachers, because I have also been asked things about Mark referred to as such outside of class by numerous JTEs, is kind of disturbing. I haven’t quite figured out the tactful way to explain, in class, the difference between one’s lover and one’s boy/girlfriend. It’s not exactly a subject that just naturally comes up. Also, even though they use the Engrish phrase “boifurendo” (boyfriend), I don’t think it has quite the same connotations in Japanese. Ah, cultural differences.

2003-01-30T02:34:00.000-08:00

Entrance Exams
So we’ve all heard the stories about how stressed Japanese students are. What most people don’t realize is that the really stressed students are in junior high, not senior. Today was the explanation of why. Today was entrance exam interview day at Mukaiyama High for those privileged students who received good recommendations from their junior highs. Other students will apply through the general admissions process in mid-February.

Getting into high school is a big deal. It’s more stressful than getting into university. The right high school is what will get you into college, really. To get into high school, or at least into Mukaiyama, students with good recommendations have to come and be interviewed. 90+ students were interviewing for regular admission, while 30-some more were interviewing for the special math/science track. Each interview team had one science or math teacher involved, so they could ask specific questions about theorems. Of these, only 60 will be admitted to the general course, and only 16 to the math and science track. Remember, Mukaiyama is one of the top 5 schools in the prefecture, so high level, our students don’t have to wear uniforms.

Students were asked why they want to enter Mukaiyama, what’s their motivation, and what they have accomplished in junior high, among other things. They were called in random numerical order to go in for their 10-minute interview, and the interviews spanned 2 hours in all. My job was to stand in the hall and gesture to Kamiyama-sensei about which room was finished so he could then call the next student out of the waiting room. These kids all looked incredibly nervous. I’ve never seen students act so scrupulously polite. Each one would come to the door of their interview room, put their bags on the shelf in the hallway, knock on the door, wait to be told to enter, carefully opened the door, stopped, bowed low while saying “shitsureshimasu” (excuse me for disturbing you), and then turned to close the door.

I’ve been working at Mukaiyama for 6 months now, and let me tell you, none of the students normally act like that. None of our students wear uniforms, they joke with the teachers all the time, and they’re in and out of the staff room all the time with only the sketchiest of bows and an absent-minded “shitsureshimasu.” The contrast is evident; these poor kids today were terrified.

There was one girl who was nearly shaking when she entered her room, only to be sent back out into the hall after her ID slip, which she had put back in her folder in her bag. Just a little thing, but it totally threw her off. When she came out at the end of her interview, she immediately started to cry. This being Japan, one does not offer physical comfort by touching a shoulder or anything, so all I could do was stand there and get her to take deep breaths. I at least know enough Japanese to be able to say, “It’s alright.” After she got herself a little bit back together, she bowed deeper than any student has ever done to me, and thanked me.

Geez, but I’m glad I’m not a Japanese junior high school student. I really am.

2003-01-28T00:14:00.000-08:00

Your ALT wants You to speak in class
Noooo!!! I just taught a class with my teacher who doesn’t like team-teaching, and it actually went well. I had the students as engaged as bored 5th period Japanese high schoolers get, I had the teacher working with me to some extent, I even had kids volunteering to answer the questions! That never happens, and now I’ve had it happen in two classes in the past two weeks. So why is this a bad thing? Because March 1st is graduation day. After that, all these students move up to second year and I have to start all over with a fresh new crop of reticent first years. Oh, I could just cry. Well, maybe not. But the whole idea makes me very tired.

2003-01-28T00:12:00.000-08:00

Kitty-chan
On Sunday, Sharon and I went out to Matsushima to see all the islands in the snow. It was very pretty, there were hardly any people around, it got me out of the house, and we built a very sad little snowman on the train platform while waiting for the right train to come. Someone came by and stole his head right after we got on the train. Maybe they just thought it was extra; there seems to be some sort of cultural phenomenon determining whether people think snowmen are supposed to be made of two balls or three. He also had no arms, so maybe the person just thought it was an odd pile of snow.

Anyhow, after Matsushima, we went back into Sendai before Sharon had to go to church. I introduced her to Uni-qlo, and miraculously, we both exited without making any purchases. Then we went for coffee, of course. Despite our best intentions, Sharon still ended up leaving 5 minutes late for church, and I headed for the nearest subway.

And now the point of this story starts. When I was in elementary school, Sanrio characters were really big. What’s a Sanrio character, you ask? Think Hello Kitty, My Melody, Kerokeropi, etc, etc. It was the store to go to for elementary school girl birthday presents. I still have stationery in my collection from that time.

But Hello Kitty never went out of fashion here. She’s been exceedingly popular for the past 20 years, and will most likely continue to be so. They have a Hello Kitty theme park here, for goodness sake. And between the coffee shop and the subway station, there is a Sanrio store. I’ve walked past it dozens of times since I arrived in Sendai, but I never went in because there were always other people with me, or I actually had a destination in mind, or whatever. Sunday night, though, I had no one with me and nothing to stop me, so in I went.

Almost all of the store here is taken up by Hello Kitty, or, as they call her here, Kitty-chan merchandise. The other characters barely make it onto stickers and stationery. And on the first floor, they have a whole wall full of Kitty-chan keitai bobbles. Like I said, in Japan, everyone has things dangling off their cell phones. Originally, I just had the plain, boring strap that came in the box with the phone. After New Year’s, I added the little bell that came with my fortune, but that was still quite tame compared to most Japanese cell phones. What I needed was a cartoon character.

What I got is so incredibly Sendai. It’s Kitty-chan dressed as Date Masumune, the guy who ruled this whole region way back in the 17th century. Good ol’ Date lost his eye to a childhood illness, so he sports an eye patch, and he has this helmet with a big crescent moon on it that looks like horns, or, if you’re Danola, a banana. I’ll assume he was also something of a musician, as Kitty is carrying a violin as an accessory to her full armor, helmet, and heart-shaped eye patch. Needless to say, the original’s eye patch was not a bright red heart. At least, I assume it wasn’t. Maybe that was the style back then, and Kitty-chan is more historically accurate than I give her credit for. Somehow, I doubt it.

Anyway, now my phone is looking very Japanese. I even figured out how to program numbers into it, a mere 5 months after I got it. So if I’d just play games on it or send text messages while on the train, I’d blend right in. You know, like all Caucasian Americans here do.

2003-01-24T01:28:00.000-08:00

Stuff and nonsense
First of all, all of northern Japan got lots of snow yesterday and today, including, for once, Miyagi. Usually, we’re surrounded by this weird, anti-snow force field, so all the prefectures around us have little snowmen on the weather map, but we just have a cloud or an umbrella, or even a sun. But yesterday, about half an hour after I got to work, it started snowing hard and sticking, so we ended up with 4-5 inches in downtown Sendai, which is apparently the most in 10 years. I’m thinking that the entire northern hemisphere is undergoing a cold snap right now, from all the cold weather reports I’m getting from people in other places as well.

Now for some odd cultural notes. For those of you who’ve been to Japan now, you may have noticed that a lot of women here tend to walk in pigeon-toed fashion. I have now found out there is a reason for this. Traditionally, the lady-like way to walk is with the toes pointed slightly inward, especially when wearing kimono and appropriate footwear. Thus, all those pigeon-toed women in the perilously heeled boots are actually walking in demure, womanly fashion.

I have also found out the reason for some cars having yellow license plates and others having white. If a car has a yellow plate, it means that it is not fuel efficient enough to travel between prefectures, nor on large expressways within prefectures, I think. I at least know for sure that the drivers can be fined if in a yellow-plated car from another prefecture. Japan is very concerned about the environment. In the second-year textbook, I just helped teach a lesson about the spread of deserts and the hole in the ozone layer. How would you like to try to teach a bunch of Japanese speakers to pronounce “chlorofluorocarbon?”

2003-01-21T00:43:00.000-08:00

The Kyoto/Tokyo Epic Adventure: Part III
And now you get to hear about all the other stuff we saw that was neither temple nor castle. I guess the best way to describe this section is Etc. Isn’t that precise?

The biggest thing in Kyoto, and I’m probably not exaggerating at all, is the train station itself. It’s huge. We didn’t realize it when we arrived, but the part of it that’s actually dedicated to the arrival and departure of trains is miniscule in comparison to the whole. It is quite possibly the largest single structure I’ve ever seen. Or maybe it just seemed that way because the central part was open air with escalators and stairs appearing to continue up the side of the building for miles, and we were standing there in the cold, wondering how we were going to find anything for dinner in the middle of all that. We did inadvertently go all the way to the top of the building, which is something like 12 stories up, but oddly stair stepped and confusing, and see one of the guidebook’s “best views of Kyoto,” but we weren’t very impressed because, as I said, it was cold and we were hungry, and on top of the building is where all the wind was, which wasn’t helping. Besides which, we had climbed all the way to the top of some gigantic hill (Daimon-ji?) with many, many, many steps earlier and seen a much better view of Kyoto, in the daylight. Anyway, the main part of the station building is actually 2 gigantic department stores, with restaurants and tourist offices and train platforms occasionally thrown in for general interest and confusion. And in case that wasn’t enough, you can go outside and down into the pedestrian underpass that connects all the bus stops and subway stations out in front of the main station, so you don’t have to get hit by cars. There you’ll find a whole other shopping arcade, with more restaurants, and a confusing circular layout, since they couldn’t really expand upward.

What else, what else? We tried to go see Gion, the geisha district, but we were there at the wrong time without a guidebook or a very good map, so we didn’t see much of interest at all, although we did find a Starbucks. Kyoto seems to have missed out on much of the café craze that grips the rest of Japan. We went for days without seeing a Starbucks. We nearly died. Well, not really, but I’m surprised all the Japanese tourists from more coffee-rich cities like Tokyo haven’t dropped dead in the streets or staged and uprising or something. But to get back to the point, Gion was kind of a bust, so I suggest that if you want to find out more about geisha culture, you read Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden, which is fiction, or Geisha, by Liz Dalby, the only non-Japanese woman ever to train as a geisha.

The only other thing I can think of that we did in Kyoto was visit the traditional craft center. 6 floors of quality tourist souvenirs, as well as some really tacky plastic junk in the back, too. Most of what they had on display was woodblock prints, pottery, jewelry, second-hand kimono, and handmade paper. Oh, and swords. On the first floor, my dad and brother immediately found the sword section and had this very nice, English-speaking young man in white gloves showing them all the various long and short swords, and explaining the difference between the ones just for show, and the ones actually properly balanced and made of cutting-grade steel.

On to Tokyo. Perhaps you are thinking, “What? Just now? How long is this blog entry going to be? Should I go to the bathroom now, or maybe get a snack?” To put your mind at ease, no, it’s not going to be that long. We really didn’t do that much in Tokyo. We were there just before New Year’s, and almost everything we wanted to see was closed for the holidays, so it was really a lot of wandering around in the streets.

Most notably, we wandered around in the streets of the neighborhood where the sumo wrestlers train. Originally, the plan was to find their training stable and see them actually doing stuff, but they train from 7-11 am, and presumably spend the rest of the day eating or whatever. We got there right around 11, discovered that our map was, like every map in Japan, quite vague when actually put to use, and then proceeded to wander aimlessly until someone spotted… actual sumo wrestlers! Walking in their natural habitat! Barefoot and in yukata (think kimono, made of cotton, and without trailing sleeves or wide belts), at the end of December. Just out, wandering around like we were, although they presumably were out cooling down and knew where they were going.

My mother and I also wandered around looking for the flagship Muji store after we all went to the Meiji Shrine, but we never found it. My dad really liked the Meiji Shrine. This time we were visiting it much earlier in the day than the last time I went, and we were able to explore more, without fear of getting kicked out because they wanted to close the gates. There are all sorts of paths and parks and stuff back there. The shrine itself wasn’t as much fun as last time, for me, because they had all sorts of banners and booths set up in preparation for the vast hordes expected at New Year’s, and there weren’t any people in wedding finery getting their pictures taken, but really, you can’t have everything.

Item of note: Harajuku Bridge, just outside the main entrance to the Meiji Shrine, is where all the cos-play people hang out. “Cos-play” is short for “costume players,” and means people who dress up like their favorite manga (Japanese comic books) characters. They are truly bizarre looking. Lots of short hot-pink dresses, platform boots, goths in black, outlandish hair, weird make-up, and cross-dressing. And they just hang out like that. They’re not doing anything, not reciting lines or acting scenes, just chilling, looking strange.

Two things we actually managed to do successfully in Tokyo were go to the Traditional Crafts Center, and go to dinner with Jamin, Dayle, and Drew. The Traditional Craft Center was, conveniently, in the shopping area right across from our very nice hotel, and my mom and I bought lots and lots of paper. Or rather, I bought lots and lots of paper. My mom was original and bought other things, too, like a teapot and some fabric. They also had displays of all the different kinds of wood found in Japan, and kimonos, and pottery, and we spent a lot of time in there.

We went out to eat with Jamin, Dayle, and Drew, who are all the people, minus Darin, who I knew from Beloit. Drew’s still in high school, but he got a trip to Japan for Christmas, and he and Dayle were staying with Jamin in Tokyo for a few days. After demonstrating the real use of cell phones in Japan for my parents, that being to find other people in a large crowd, our two little groups managed to meet up, and then Jamin led us to a good Thai restaurant. It was fun to see all of them, and we were in Shinjuku, with all the bright lights and hordes that people expect of Tokyo, so my parents and brother got to experience that after all. Of course, my dad and brother went to Akihabara, the electronics district, so I guess they got to see it then, just not at night. I refused to go back there.

And then the trip came to an end. My family caught a shuttle bus directly from the hotel to the airport, and I shinked (ALT for “took a shinkansen”) back to Sendai. So ends the Kyoto/Tokyo epic adventure.

2003-01-19T01:59:00.000-08:00

Castles, addendum
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, there was one more castle. More of a palace, really. The Imperial Palace in Kyoto, to be exact. How did I forget the Imperial Palace, you ask? Well, because it’s been several weeks now, and also, it just wasn’t as impressive. We weren’t allowed to walk inside it or anything, and one wing of it was under renovation. So phooey to them.

The Imperial Palace does lead me to address some comments sent to me by “alert readers,” as Dave Barry puts it, namely those about furnishings in castles in general. (Geez, some of y’all are fast! What are you doing, checking my blog every day? You’re gonna make me feel bad about the sporadic updating!) I think I may have been slightly misleading when I said that the audience chambers at Nijo-jo were meant to overawe with ornateness. In the Western tradition, this would imply lots of heavy furniture with gilt and drapes and whatnot. In Japanese palaces, this means very nicely painted sliding screen panels, open tatami floors, and not much else. The Shogun got an armrest stand when he was lounging at his ease, and small tables could be brought out and places before people kneeling on the floor, but that was it for furniture. Screens, scrolls, weapons on walls, and clothes were really how the Japanese conveyed status and ornateness. Not even the really wealthy had chairs and tables and beds. Kind of like me; I’m living in imperial style!

Also, when I said that castles were cold and drafty, I was apparently somewhat mistaken in that generality, at least as it applies to castles toured in Scotland by my friend Will. Japanese castles, to be specific, are drafty, and for good reason. There are very few stationary walls. Especially at the Imperial Palace and at Nijo-jo, almost all of the walls of the buildings could be slid to one side or raised up and fixed in place to allow for air flow and a good view. While I’m sure this was great in the summer, in the winter, the floors were rather cold.

Anyway, the Imperial Palace was a vast complex. You have to apply for permission to tour it ahead of time, and give them your passport number and everything. The tour takes you around the outsides of the buildings, but you don’t get close enough to many of them to see much of the insides. The courtyards are all raked white gravel, and the torii gates at various entrances are painted bright orange. There are various theories about the why of this color choice, from orange traditionally repels demons to the architects were trying to copy the Chinese and got orange confused with crimson as the color for luck. In any case, it’s striking, and it doesn’t look at all bad with the white walls and cypress bark roofs.

The only furniture of note was the Emperor’s throne, which has to be available for all coronations. For the coronation of the last emperor, it was actually transported to Tokyo, if I recall correctly, rather than the coronation being moved to Kyoto. As near as I could tell, from across the courtyard, it was impressive.

We also saw the private imperial gardens outside the private quarters, which were very nice, with streams full of koi to make my father very jealous. It was at this stage that we were also informed about the difference between the sliding walls and the hinged ones. Apparently, the big heavy wall panels that hinge at the top and swung outward to be hung from hooks on the rafters were the old style of architecture and much less convenient than the sliding panels that soon came into fashion. The private residence can be seen as a melding of the two styles of architecture, as it incorporates both kinds of walls.

The imperial family still occasionally has to do official stuff at the palace in Kyoto, so I assume that’s why we weren’t let into any of the buildings. In any case, I think that really does finish off all the castles and palaces and otherwise official dwellings that we visited.