Here are some more random thoughts and observations from my past six months here in Japan.
Last summer, I had dinner with the Mayor of Kagoshima City. About seven high school students from Miami came over for a week long visit. The city had a fancy dinner for them and I was asked to go as a representative from the Kagoshima City Board of Education, my employer. The big, big boss from my office and I took a taxi over to the hotel together. We went up to the top floor and into the private dining room with with the big window overlooking the bay and volcano. There, we were joined by the city mayor, a few more important people, the students and their teacher and two translators.
One of the translators was my friend Juanita, from Australia. She had to sit behind those of us on the Japanese side of the table and translate. It was a bit strange because we were all eating dinner and she had to sit behind us and translate. No food for her. But, lots of good food for me.
The Japanese government is making an effort to improve Math and English education in the junior high schools. They are making a push for all classes to either have two teachers or only 20 students. Now, many of my schools have what they count as an extra English teacher and they make an effort to divide the class into two smaller groups. Here is an excellent opportunity to provide remedial help for those who need it and also a more challenging level for those above average students. But, instead of splitting the classes up by ability, most of them have split them up by student number. That is to say, alphabetically. The goal of Japanese education is to have everyone at the same level at the end, and dividing them by level would not work towards this goal. So, in this way, the above average students are still a bit bored and the below average students are still lost and sleeping.
At the beginning of the school year, each class went outside for a class photo. The students and teachers seemed excited that I was visiting their school on that day and I got invited to sit in a a bunch of class photos. Later, I found out that these photos were not for student use. They were reserved for the big book that shows all the students of that school. This way, if a concerned local citizen sees some students misbehaving outside of school, they can come to the school and use the pictures to help them to identify the culprits. Essentially, I made it into a whole bunch of mug shots.
They don't have Winnie the Pooh and Santa Claus here. They have Pooh-san and Santa-san.
Having purchased a small two pound bag of rice at the store last year and finished it, I was ready for the next level of excitement in buying rice. I went to street side vending machine that sold rice in bags of 11 pounds or 22 pounds. In Japan, you pay for convenience. And, everyone knows that carrying home one 22 pound bag of rice would be more convenient than two 11 pound bags. So, accordingly, the bigger bag cost more than twice as much as the two smaller sized bags. I put my money into the machine, pressed the button and out came my 11 pound bag, already in a plastic carrying bag, with some recipes and coupons in it.
My next step in buying rice would be to go to one of the small automated roadside silos of rice and buy a 50 pound bag, but I have yet to finish off the 11 pound one.
Almost all dry snack foods seem to come with a small packet of desiccant to keep them dry inside. It is amazing the number of things that they think require desiccant. Once, I even found some in my korean kim chee, which is a very wet spicy cabbage dish. I never knew that you could put desiccant in wet foods.
In Japanese, the months are numbered, not named. January is "One Month", February is "Two Month" and so on. But, they do have a set of twelve month names from the distant past that are used in poetry. Students usually learn them in high school. I came across them on my own and started using them in my homework. My teacher told me that my homework was not poetry and I should not use them. Now I just ask the students questions like "Which month is Satsuki in English?" and then enjoy the confused look on their faces when they do not know the meaning of the Japanese word.
I still enjoy looking through my electronic dictionary for strange words in Japanese. Some of my recent finds include "kuchi utsushi de nomaseru" which means "to let a person drink from your mouth." "Anjuu no chi wo motomeru" means "to seek a place for peaceful living." "Degake ni" means "just as one is about to leave home." "Sato ga erimasu" means "to make one's call at one's old home after getting married." I have found lots of fun words and my teacher often laughs out loud when she reads my homework.
The word "hana" means "flower". "Mizu" is "water". I thought "hana mizu" should mean water from a flower. But, "hana" also means "nose" and "hana mizu" means snot. My students enjoyed that mistake.
They say that the Japanese language relies on lots of "unspoken communication" such as body language, but I haven't seen any of this yet.
They don't call in substitute teachers in the schools here. If a teacher is absent, another teacher takes over the class for the day. If there are no other available teachers, the students are perfectly capable of sitting quietly in the class and reading or doing work. If they get too loud, the teacher from the next class will come in for a moment and quiet them down.
At PTA events and graduation ceremonies, they take attendance - of the parents.
I went on a school trip with the 7th graders from Kamoike JHS. We went to the park for a few hours and ran around and had fun. At the end, we took garbage bags and spent 30 minutes going around the park and picking up trash.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Monday, October 20, 2003
Lots of fun things in Japan and America
Well, I guess it has been a little bit longer than usual since my last update. Before Japan, when I was traveling, it was easy to get bored in some new city every month or two and sneak away to an Internet cafe and update my web page. Now that I am living in a city and am making every effort to keep completely busy, I find that I have no time to sit around and type. There is always something else to do. Besides all of my various outside interests, there is a whole range of domestic experiences that make demands upon my time now that I am stationary. Things like cooking dinner, cleaning the bathroom, paying bills, making the bed, ironing a shirt every few months and having a girlfriend. All things which never seemed to catch up with me when I was camping or sleeping in hotels all of the time, but are none the less an integral part of the non-wandering experience.
So, I guess I will just start with where I left off last time. Last April, the new school year started. The first week of school was pretty easy for me. After the starting ceremony, the rest of the week was taken up with health checks. All sorts of doctors and dentists came to poke and prod the students. In the afternoons, the teachers visited all of the student's houses to meet the parents.
The weekend before school started, Rie and I went for her first camping trip. Japan has lots of great campgrounds, but they are only open in July and August -The Camping Season. I found out early in my stay here, that outside of those two months the campgrounds are still great, and empty. We went on over to the Osumi Peninsula (across the bay) and found a nice place to camp. The chain across the gate was old and rusted and held together by a small piece of wire. It was a simple matter to untwist the wire, drive in, and re-twist the wire to close the gate. Suddenly, we had a big nice campground complete with wild pigs, a river, a view up the valley and platforms for the tent all to ourselves. Despite the ice on the ground the next morning, we had a great time.
Later in April, on the 20th, a few of us went to Fukiage for a race. It was only 7km (a bit over 4 miles) but nearly half of it was along the beach, in the sand. That made it a bit of a challenge. My friend, Natalie, won fifth place for her age group. Her prize was a pair of socks. Afterwards, we went to the (in my mind, at least) mandatory post-race hot spring to relax. From the 26th of April until the 5th of May we had what is called "Golden Week". By taking a few days of paid vacation, I had 10 days to ride my bike. I live on an island called Kyushu. It has lots of mountains up the middle and I decided to ride north, through the mountains. One of the holidays of Golden Week is Children's Day. Before the big day, families with boys put up very tall poles and hang carp shaped kites all over the place. They were nice to look at as I cycled by. The second day out was spent mostly climbing one very big hill, with a stop to look at a waterfall. On the third day, I got to Mt. Aso, a 50 mile wide volcanic caldera. They claim it is the largest in the world. After climbing the side, I rode down into the middle. It is so big, that they have towns, roads, fields and even train service inside the former volcano mouth. In the middle of the crater, there is a very tall mountain, which is all that is left of the active portion of the volcano. I rode up there to the visitor's center near the top. Unfortunately, the actual active portion of the volcanic crater at the top was spitting out some noxious fumes that day, so I was not allowed to climb the last 200 feet and look down into it.
From the top of Mt. Aso, I rode down the other side to the caldera floor and then back up the other side of the caldera wall. Then, it was mostly down hill to the hot-spring town of Kurokawa. I found a campground outside of the town and at night a bunch of us went in and soaked in a beautiful outdoor, river-side hot spring. On day four, I rode all the way to the northern Kyushu city of Fukuoka. It is a very large city and the bike ride in along the busy roads was not fun. That night was the first little bit of rain on my bike ride and, since I was in the middle of a big city, I decided to get a hotel room instead of camping. I spent the evening looking around the city. They have a much bigger red light district than Kagoshima.
I am not a big fan of large cities, so I left early the next morning and started going west. I rode through Saga Prefecture and spent the night camping in the hills above the town of Sasebo. In Sasebo, visible from my perch, they build huge ocean going super-tankers. Also, there is a very big U.S. Navy base there with lots of Americans in town.
Early the next morning, I took a ferry out to the one of the five Goto Islands. It took me a few hours to ride from the ferry terminal to the bottom of the island, where I caught another ferry and went down to the next island. That night, after crossing the island, I found a small town with a hot spring and a nice park to camp in.
On Day seven, I took the afternoon ferry to the city of Nagasaki. Approaching by sea, Nagasaki reminded me of San Francisco. It is a smallish city, on a big bay with lots of hills. I spent the next morning visiting the Peace Parks and nuclear bomb museums. I was surprised to see that the museums actually mentioned some of Japan's aggressive actions before World War Two. Although, it was a shame that they chose to blame the worst of Japan's expansion into Manchuria on "renegade army groups." I was also happy to note that (in the 1970's) they added a plaque for the thousands of Korean slave laborers who also died there. In the park, they have what they hope is not an eternal flame. It looks like an eternal flame, but they will put it out when the last nuclear bomb in the world is dismantled. I hope they don't have to wait to long, but I am not holding my breath. The museum's display of bomb damaged people and products was interesting, but the final area impressed me the most. They had a display on the damage that nuclear arms continue to cause. They had videos of people whose current work brings them into contact with America's and Russia's nuclear arsenals. They also had videos of people who live near military bases where these bombs are stored. Video after video told horrifying tales of sickness and extensive government health monitoring programs in these areas. There was one woman who related her tale of when she was in grade school. The government monitors came in and she set off the Geiger counter. They told her not to drink so much water at home.
Another reason I liked Nagasaki so much, was that not only was it easy to get into by boat, but it was easy to get out of by bike. Thirty minutes of riding up the hill facing the water brought me back into the countryside. I rode down the backside of that hill and ended up in a small port town, from which I took a ferry to one of the Amakusa Islands. After crossing that island, I took another ferry to Minamata, near my own Kagoshima Ken. On the ninth day, I re-entered Kagoshima Ken, and naturally, it started to pour. I became convinced that it only rains in Kagoshima. I had nearly perfect weather on the rest of my ride. Some of the islands I visited had perfect sand beaches with blue water and lots of sunshine.
Before my last night of camping on this trip (and the first rainy one) I went to a fantastic hot spring near the town of Sendai. After one full day of riding in the rain, and ten days in total, I returned home in time for an easy four day work week.
Near the end of May, I had a conference to go to in the city of Kobe. It was a conference for all first year JETs in southern Japan who had re-contracted for a second year. More than 1000 people attended. I new the dates of the conference a few months in advance, so I tried to buy some flight tickets. Of course, riding there would have been more fun, but I figured it was about eight days away by bike and I did not have enough vacation days to spare. In February, when I first started checking out prices I learned something interesting about the Japanese travel industry. The airlines only publish their schedules and fares two months in advance. So, all I could do was make a reservation based on last years times and prices and subject to change when the new schedules were published. I decide to wait until April. I went back with my friends Dana and Felicity and we found the flights with the best times and prices for us and made reservations. This was when I learned the great up-side to the Japanese system for customers. Once we had reservations, they were guaranteed. We did not have to actually pay for the tickets until the day before the flight. When we finally went in to pay, we learned that they had made a booking error and for the same price, were now on a more expensive and more convenient flight.
The three of us flew to Kyoto and visited the Golden Temple. We also saw the famous rock garden nearby. The culture stuff was nice, but for me, cities mean food. We ate mediocre Mexican food that night and wandered around the central shopping area. The next day we took a train to the city of Nara. They have a big park there with lots of deer and temples. They also have the world's largest wooden building. The original burnt down a long time ago and this one is only a two thirds size reproduction, but it is still the biggest wooden building in the world. Inside is a huge Buddha statue. That night, the 25th of May, we returned to Kyoto and ate Nepali food. I ate the Nepali national dish of rice and lentils, the same meal I ate at least a hundred times when I was in Nepal. It brought back lots of good memories.
On the Monday, we headed over to Kobe and went to the small island full of hotels where we were staying. It was a nice three day conference without too many boring speakers. The keynote speakers were a pair of very energetic former JETs who now have their own company for teaching the teachers of Japanese elementary students. They reminded a very receptive audience that the Japanese teachers can go home at the end of their day (7 or 8) and be off work. But, for us JETs, when we go home at 4:15, we can not relax and forget about our jobs. Our job is to promote "Internationalism" and we do this every time we leave the house. When someone sees us shopping or jogging or eating, then they can say "Oh, look, there is a foreign person" and we are doing our jobs of "Internationalizing" Japan.
The other memorable speech from the conference was from a professor at a Japanese university. He gave a wonderful speech on the goals of teaching English as a second language. He pointed out that we could have an alternative goal when we teach and he suggested we not only teach English, but also create "World citizens" at the same time. Every time we teach a grammar point we have the option of using a theme for the day to help us. He suggested that we use topics such as world hunger, war and environmental pollution to help us teach English. That way, at the end of the course, the students will have learned some English and have gained some world understanding. It was a very thought provoking and inspiring speech.
On the 4th of June, Kagoshima City had an English Speech Contest for Junior High School students. In the weeks leading up to the big day all of us JETs were busy helping students at our various schools to prepare. In some schools we helped a lot and in others not at all. At Wada Junior High School, I helped a very little bit and at Taniyamakita I helped a bit more. Most of the JETs from my office (9 out of 10) showed up to watch the event. Some students were impossible to understand, but many were very good. They had good pronunciation and interesting topics. The students with the most confidence and enthusiasm did the best. Luckily for me, and much to the disappointment of my fellow JETs, my students won everything. Two boys from Taniyamakita JHS won the 8th grade contest with a nice skit about baseball. Another one of my students, from Wada, won the 9th grade contest with a speech about his cat. The three of them each received a two week trip to Miami over the summer. I was very happy for them.
The speech contest made the evening news, and so did I, for a few seconds. For the next week, nearly everyone I know mentioned seeing me on TV. I was famous, among people who already knew me.
Two days later, I held my final English class for the Tamae Elementary School Little Cherries Jazz and Swing Band before their trip to Clarinda, Iowa for the Laurence Welk Festival. Someone gave me a microphone to wear before the class and the entire hour was filmed. I made the news again when the Little Cherries returned a few weeks later and their mini-documentary was shown on TV. Another 20 seconds of fame has been knocked off my allotted 15 minutes.
School and life continued for another few weeks with the normal amount of goofing off at school and bike riding or hiking on the weekends. One weekend, I took the ferry over to Tarumizu, across the bay, and rode my bike a few miles up the valley. From the end of the road, I started walking up the river. There were several large pools and I had to swim upstream at times. I went up for about three hours and had a great time swimming, walking or climbing higher. I eventually reached a steep gorge that was blocked off by a huge boulder with water pouring over it. There was a small hole off to the side that I am sure I could of crawl/climbed through, but there was a dead and rotting deer or pig carcass wedged in the hole and I did not feel like picking it out. Maybe it will be gone by next summer and I can try again.
On the 17th of July, I flew to Boston to start off five weeks of vacation in America. I had my usual enjoyable visit with my Dad, Elizabeth and Emily. Emily and I played games and my father and I went to lots of movies and restaurants. On the 19th, Dad and Emily and I went to see the U.S. Mens National Soccer Team play Cuba as part of the CONCACAF Gold Cup. Landon Donavon scored three goals and helped lead the US to a 6-1 victory. But, perhaps more exciting, was the crowd warming up for the following game between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. While the US was racking up the points, the fans for the next game were marching around with drums and cheering in anticipation.
After a family reunion softball game, I went to stay with Milo in New York City. I had a good time hanging out there and ate lots of good food in "The City." I also got to see a bunch of my favorite friends. Susie was in Baltimore for a family reunion and was able to spare an afternoon for me. Sue and her new family were in town and we had a pizza dinner and some ice cream. Matt and his girlfriend were around and we went to an interesting show. It was staged in and around a pool on the roof of a hotel.
After a fun week of hanging out with Milo, I went to New Jersey. I had a great visit with Josh, Nancy, Aunt Anne, and UNCLE JIM. I watched him play the guitar and sing in a cafe with his brother and friends. We also enjoyed our annual game of pitch and putt golf. His recent back surgery did not slow him down at all and I lost, like always.
On the 3rd of August, I flew down to Florida. I spent a few weeks sitting on the couch, watching TV and eating my mother's cooking. I also found time to visit my cousins and grandparents. I left for Japan again on the 21st and arrived on the 23rd. Those two days of travel also included a fun six hours in Korea. I brought back about 100 pounds of food from my mother and have been enjoying it ever since.
Once back in Japan, I had a week in the office to goof off and then it was back to school and the start of the second tri-mester. After the first week of school, I went back to Hayato town for the annual sailing race. We had a bit more wind than last year and sailed well. The race was followed by some swimming, a big bbq lunch and a nap in my hammock.
In addition to the three schools I visited last year, I have a new one to go to this year. It is very small and far away, so I only go one or two times per month. Suzuyama Junior High School is 13 miles from my house, and up a big mountain. It takes me about an hour and a half to ride my bike there. The first 30 minutes is through the city, but the final hour is a long hard climb through small mountain roads. A great way to start the day. The ride home takes well under an hour.
There are only 16 students in the whole junior high school. Only two in the 7th grade. But, as with every other class in every other school, the teacher says "Good morning everyone" at the start of each lesson. I am hoping that one of the two girls is absent some day so I can see if he still says "Good morning everyone." At lunch time, all of the teachers and students eat together in one classroom.
Because there are so few students, the school is combined with a 24 student elementary school. So, I will get to visit them as well and play lots of games with a bunch of little kids.
On the 12th of September, I flew up to Tokyo. My friends Karla and Daniel, from Colorado, flew in and I met them in the airport. The next day, we took lots of different trains to the Mt. Fuji area and then a taxi to the end of the road, half way up the mountain. We got there in the very late afternoon and it was windy and cold and getting dark. We started hiking up. After a bit over two hours and a little bit of rain and a lot of cold, we came to the eighth station and our home for the night.
In the little mountain hut, we ate dinner. At least I ate dinner. Karla can be a little picky sometimes and even Daniel could not stomach all of the new Japanese food. After that, it was time for bed. In this mountain hut, the bed room consisted of a two tiered section of floor about six feet wide and twenty feet long. We were crammed in there, head to toes, with a lot of other people, including some very loud snorers. I was wedged between two strange men with very smelly feet. I did not sleep much that night. We had no trouble being up and ready to go before 2:00 am.
In the middle of the night, we started climbing again. There were occasional large groups of Japanese following a guide. The guides always had two foot long red LED light sticks and looked liked they should be directing traffic on at a construction sight, not climbing a mountain. We got to the top of the 12,290 foot peak of the volcano about an hour before sunrise. We waited in the cold, with the gathering crowd to watch the sunrise. We were lucky with the weather and watched the sunrise over a beautiful clear day. After a few hours of running down hill, we were back at the starting point and ready to catch a bus back to Tokyo. It was a great bus ride, but I don't remember a thing. I slept the whole ride.
Once back in Tokyo, I headed to the Shinjuku area and one of the uniquely Japanese experiences that I had been looking forward to for a very long time. I went to a capsule hotel. Capsule hotels are designed for business men who miss the last train home and must sleep in the city or for people who go out drinking and need a place to crash. I checked in at the front desk and was given a locker key. I went to the locker and found my small blue robe and pair of blue boxer shorts waiting for me. I changed into the hotel guest clothing and put the rest of my luggage into the storeroom. Next, I checked out my capsule.
I went down to floor with my capsule and found number 3142. It was near the end of a long hallway and it was an upper bunk. The capsule itself was about three feet high, three feet wide and six feet long. A little big, but still comfortable. I crawled in and checked out the small tv and radio. The light controls also worked well.
Down the hallway from my "room", was a lounge. They had some video games, drink machines and a tv. A bunch of men were sitting around in their boxers and robes, smoking and watching tv. I went up a few flights of stairs, past the lockers and saunas, to the fifth floor. There was a restaurant there with lots of men sitting around and eating and watching tv, all wearing the blue shorts and short robes, except for the me who did not wear medium sized boxers. The large size boxers were bright orange. I enjoyed the feeling of walking through a small city where everybody was dressed the same.
Next to the restaurant was a massage room. I went up another flight of stairs to the hot spring level. They also had a barber shop and big area with all sorts of hair and body tonics, blow dryers and combs and mirrors. To the left was a big room with lots of small taps to wash yourself at. There was also a large central pool for soaking. I washed up and then went through to the other side of the floor. There was another big hot pool for soaking and small Japanese women who gave massages and walked on your back, for an extra fee. I went past them into the sauna and watched tv in there for a while. Then it was time for the extra special feature of the city center seventh floor hot spring - the outside bath. The view was nothing special, being of only the tops of a few nearby buildings, but the water was nice and hot and it was a good night to be outside soaking.
When it was time for bed, which was early for me because I had not slept at all the night before, I went back to my capsule and crawled in. The roll down door of wooden slats let in a bit too much light, so I hung my blanket over the door and it got dark enough to sleep comfortably. I was worried that when all the drunk people came in later, that they would wake me, but I never heard a peep. I woke up the next day at 4:30 to catch a bus to the airport and the hotel was full of people who had come in during the night and not made any noise.
On September 15th (Respect for the Aged Day), I flew back to Kagoshima and met Karla and Daniel there. I was excited to have my friends here for a week and couldn't wait to show them many of my favorite things. With Rie, we went straight to some whirly noodles for lunch. That afternoon we visited the local gardens. For the rest of the week we went to the beach, played in the river near Tarumizu, went to the samurai houses and Kamikaze museum in Chiran, went to the Sakurajima volcano and explored the city. I also introduced them to all sorts of good and fun Japanese restaurants. It was a great visit and I was sorry to see them go after a week.
Karla was nice enough to bring me a chain removal tool for me to use on my bike. The day after they left, I spent a few hours completely dis-assembling my bike. The next day, I cleaned each part and spent over eight hours putting it all back together. I only had one small piece left over when I was done. Not too bad, if I do say so myself. Of course, not all was perfect on the bike and I spent the next week or so fine tuning all of the little adjustments. On my 30 mile ride the next Saturday, I had to stop every few miles to turn a screw or adjust a knob. But, eventually, everything was back to tip top and sparkling clean shape. And now, I have more confidence in the workings of my bike and my ability to repair it. Confidence and skill that will be important in my proposed three month crossing of Japan from north to south by bike next summer.
On the 4th of October, I went on a long hike with a bunch of teachers from Wada JHS. We climbed Mt. Takachiho, the highest mountain around. It was a long and enjoyable climb. We were lucky with the weather and had a great view from the top. After a soak in a nearby hot spring, we went back to one of the teachers houses for a dinner party. The teachers husband teaches German at the local university, but also spoke excellent English. I ate a lot of good food with them, while they drank a lot of wine.
On the 11th of October, I loaded up my bike and went off for a three day ride. I took the ferry to Tarumizu and started riding east. Over the summer, when I went home, I bought a little computer for my bike, so now I can keep track of all sorts of useless information while I ride. I rode east for about 50 miles, through mountains and rain. I spent that night camping in my new tent in one of the ever present perfectly groomed groves of cedar trees that are found everywhere in Japan. The next day I rode east to Nichinan on the east coast and then turned around and started back west for a good 75 mile day in the pouring rain. I camped near one of the "Top 100" waterfalls in Japan near Miyakanojo City. On the Monday, I rode the 55 miles back home. I had to come down a big hill at one point and my top speed for the weekend was 73 kmh (about 45 miles per hour). I really enjoy blowing by scooters and even passing cars on the down hill streches. Of course, on the 4 mile an hour uphills, the opposite happens.
Last Saturday, the 18th, I rode the 30 miles down to Ibusuki Town. From there I rode the 26 mile route for the Nanohana Marathon that I hope to run in January. Then I came back to Kagoshima. Usually, on my weekend rides, I avoid the busier roads, but I was in a hurry to get to and from Ibusuki, so I rode along the main road. The combination of sun screen a 86 miles of busy roads left me covered in black soot and reminded me why I don't like roads with lots of trucks and busses.
Yesterday, Rie and I drove back up to the Kirishima/Makizono area of national park and hot springs. I had obtained some sketchy directions to a free hot spring in the mountains and we decided to try to find it. Rie was a bit worried because the directions basically said to drive by some noxious gas and other dangers warning signs, park at the next set of warning signs, hike twenty minutes to the final set of big warning signs and then go down towards the steaming and boiling water in the river. But, when we finally got there (after a couple of false starts) there was other people already soaking in the river, so Rie felt a bit more comfortable.
There was stinky sulferous smoke all over the place and big sections of boiling water in the river. The first place I tried to get in was too close and way too hot. We tried downstream a little ways and the water temperature was perfect. The water was full of grey ash and small red worms but neither detered us from a nice long soak. For those of you who may remember some of my adventures in Nepal, Chile and Colorado, you well know that one of my greatest pleasures is to hike to hot springs in the mountains and soak there. I finally found a place to do that in Japan and it was great. I am hoping that it snows there this winter and we can return.
I found a 16 week training schedule for the marathon and am busy running almost every day in training. So, the rest of my weekends for this year will be spent running or resting. No more time for big bike rides until January. I thought that with all of this running, I might lose some weight, but that does not seem to have happened. Also, I still go to the gym twice a week to lift some weights. I thought that with all of this working out in the gym, I would have gained some weight, but that does not seem to be happening either.
So, I guess I will just start with where I left off last time. Last April, the new school year started. The first week of school was pretty easy for me. After the starting ceremony, the rest of the week was taken up with health checks. All sorts of doctors and dentists came to poke and prod the students. In the afternoons, the teachers visited all of the student's houses to meet the parents.
The weekend before school started, Rie and I went for her first camping trip. Japan has lots of great campgrounds, but they are only open in July and August -The Camping Season. I found out early in my stay here, that outside of those two months the campgrounds are still great, and empty. We went on over to the Osumi Peninsula (across the bay) and found a nice place to camp. The chain across the gate was old and rusted and held together by a small piece of wire. It was a simple matter to untwist the wire, drive in, and re-twist the wire to close the gate. Suddenly, we had a big nice campground complete with wild pigs, a river, a view up the valley and platforms for the tent all to ourselves. Despite the ice on the ground the next morning, we had a great time.
Later in April, on the 20th, a few of us went to Fukiage for a race. It was only 7km (a bit over 4 miles) but nearly half of it was along the beach, in the sand. That made it a bit of a challenge. My friend, Natalie, won fifth place for her age group. Her prize was a pair of socks. Afterwards, we went to the (in my mind, at least) mandatory post-race hot spring to relax. From the 26th of April until the 5th of May we had what is called "Golden Week". By taking a few days of paid vacation, I had 10 days to ride my bike. I live on an island called Kyushu. It has lots of mountains up the middle and I decided to ride north, through the mountains. One of the holidays of Golden Week is Children's Day. Before the big day, families with boys put up very tall poles and hang carp shaped kites all over the place. They were nice to look at as I cycled by. The second day out was spent mostly climbing one very big hill, with a stop to look at a waterfall. On the third day, I got to Mt. Aso, a 50 mile wide volcanic caldera. They claim it is the largest in the world. After climbing the side, I rode down into the middle. It is so big, that they have towns, roads, fields and even train service inside the former volcano mouth. In the middle of the crater, there is a very tall mountain, which is all that is left of the active portion of the volcano. I rode up there to the visitor's center near the top. Unfortunately, the actual active portion of the volcanic crater at the top was spitting out some noxious fumes that day, so I was not allowed to climb the last 200 feet and look down into it.
From the top of Mt. Aso, I rode down the other side to the caldera floor and then back up the other side of the caldera wall. Then, it was mostly down hill to the hot-spring town of Kurokawa. I found a campground outside of the town and at night a bunch of us went in and soaked in a beautiful outdoor, river-side hot spring. On day four, I rode all the way to the northern Kyushu city of Fukuoka. It is a very large city and the bike ride in along the busy roads was not fun. That night was the first little bit of rain on my bike ride and, since I was in the middle of a big city, I decided to get a hotel room instead of camping. I spent the evening looking around the city. They have a much bigger red light district than Kagoshima.
I am not a big fan of large cities, so I left early the next morning and started going west. I rode through Saga Prefecture and spent the night camping in the hills above the town of Sasebo. In Sasebo, visible from my perch, they build huge ocean going super-tankers. Also, there is a very big U.S. Navy base there with lots of Americans in town.
Early the next morning, I took a ferry out to the one of the five Goto Islands. It took me a few hours to ride from the ferry terminal to the bottom of the island, where I caught another ferry and went down to the next island. That night, after crossing the island, I found a small town with a hot spring and a nice park to camp in.
On Day seven, I took the afternoon ferry to the city of Nagasaki. Approaching by sea, Nagasaki reminded me of San Francisco. It is a smallish city, on a big bay with lots of hills. I spent the next morning visiting the Peace Parks and nuclear bomb museums. I was surprised to see that the museums actually mentioned some of Japan's aggressive actions before World War Two. Although, it was a shame that they chose to blame the worst of Japan's expansion into Manchuria on "renegade army groups." I was also happy to note that (in the 1970's) they added a plaque for the thousands of Korean slave laborers who also died there. In the park, they have what they hope is not an eternal flame. It looks like an eternal flame, but they will put it out when the last nuclear bomb in the world is dismantled. I hope they don't have to wait to long, but I am not holding my breath. The museum's display of bomb damaged people and products was interesting, but the final area impressed me the most. They had a display on the damage that nuclear arms continue to cause. They had videos of people whose current work brings them into contact with America's and Russia's nuclear arsenals. They also had videos of people who live near military bases where these bombs are stored. Video after video told horrifying tales of sickness and extensive government health monitoring programs in these areas. There was one woman who related her tale of when she was in grade school. The government monitors came in and she set off the Geiger counter. They told her not to drink so much water at home.
Another reason I liked Nagasaki so much, was that not only was it easy to get into by boat, but it was easy to get out of by bike. Thirty minutes of riding up the hill facing the water brought me back into the countryside. I rode down the backside of that hill and ended up in a small port town, from which I took a ferry to one of the Amakusa Islands. After crossing that island, I took another ferry to Minamata, near my own Kagoshima Ken. On the ninth day, I re-entered Kagoshima Ken, and naturally, it started to pour. I became convinced that it only rains in Kagoshima. I had nearly perfect weather on the rest of my ride. Some of the islands I visited had perfect sand beaches with blue water and lots of sunshine.
Before my last night of camping on this trip (and the first rainy one) I went to a fantastic hot spring near the town of Sendai. After one full day of riding in the rain, and ten days in total, I returned home in time for an easy four day work week.
Near the end of May, I had a conference to go to in the city of Kobe. It was a conference for all first year JETs in southern Japan who had re-contracted for a second year. More than 1000 people attended. I new the dates of the conference a few months in advance, so I tried to buy some flight tickets. Of course, riding there would have been more fun, but I figured it was about eight days away by bike and I did not have enough vacation days to spare. In February, when I first started checking out prices I learned something interesting about the Japanese travel industry. The airlines only publish their schedules and fares two months in advance. So, all I could do was make a reservation based on last years times and prices and subject to change when the new schedules were published. I decide to wait until April. I went back with my friends Dana and Felicity and we found the flights with the best times and prices for us and made reservations. This was when I learned the great up-side to the Japanese system for customers. Once we had reservations, they were guaranteed. We did not have to actually pay for the tickets until the day before the flight. When we finally went in to pay, we learned that they had made a booking error and for the same price, were now on a more expensive and more convenient flight.
The three of us flew to Kyoto and visited the Golden Temple. We also saw the famous rock garden nearby. The culture stuff was nice, but for me, cities mean food. We ate mediocre Mexican food that night and wandered around the central shopping area. The next day we took a train to the city of Nara. They have a big park there with lots of deer and temples. They also have the world's largest wooden building. The original burnt down a long time ago and this one is only a two thirds size reproduction, but it is still the biggest wooden building in the world. Inside is a huge Buddha statue. That night, the 25th of May, we returned to Kyoto and ate Nepali food. I ate the Nepali national dish of rice and lentils, the same meal I ate at least a hundred times when I was in Nepal. It brought back lots of good memories.
On the Monday, we headed over to Kobe and went to the small island full of hotels where we were staying. It was a nice three day conference without too many boring speakers. The keynote speakers were a pair of very energetic former JETs who now have their own company for teaching the teachers of Japanese elementary students. They reminded a very receptive audience that the Japanese teachers can go home at the end of their day (7 or 8) and be off work. But, for us JETs, when we go home at 4:15, we can not relax and forget about our jobs. Our job is to promote "Internationalism" and we do this every time we leave the house. When someone sees us shopping or jogging or eating, then they can say "Oh, look, there is a foreign person" and we are doing our jobs of "Internationalizing" Japan.
The other memorable speech from the conference was from a professor at a Japanese university. He gave a wonderful speech on the goals of teaching English as a second language. He pointed out that we could have an alternative goal when we teach and he suggested we not only teach English, but also create "World citizens" at the same time. Every time we teach a grammar point we have the option of using a theme for the day to help us. He suggested that we use topics such as world hunger, war and environmental pollution to help us teach English. That way, at the end of the course, the students will have learned some English and have gained some world understanding. It was a very thought provoking and inspiring speech.
On the 4th of June, Kagoshima City had an English Speech Contest for Junior High School students. In the weeks leading up to the big day all of us JETs were busy helping students at our various schools to prepare. In some schools we helped a lot and in others not at all. At Wada Junior High School, I helped a very little bit and at Taniyamakita I helped a bit more. Most of the JETs from my office (9 out of 10) showed up to watch the event. Some students were impossible to understand, but many were very good. They had good pronunciation and interesting topics. The students with the most confidence and enthusiasm did the best. Luckily for me, and much to the disappointment of my fellow JETs, my students won everything. Two boys from Taniyamakita JHS won the 8th grade contest with a nice skit about baseball. Another one of my students, from Wada, won the 9th grade contest with a speech about his cat. The three of them each received a two week trip to Miami over the summer. I was very happy for them.
The speech contest made the evening news, and so did I, for a few seconds. For the next week, nearly everyone I know mentioned seeing me on TV. I was famous, among people who already knew me.
Two days later, I held my final English class for the Tamae Elementary School Little Cherries Jazz and Swing Band before their trip to Clarinda, Iowa for the Laurence Welk Festival. Someone gave me a microphone to wear before the class and the entire hour was filmed. I made the news again when the Little Cherries returned a few weeks later and their mini-documentary was shown on TV. Another 20 seconds of fame has been knocked off my allotted 15 minutes.
School and life continued for another few weeks with the normal amount of goofing off at school and bike riding or hiking on the weekends. One weekend, I took the ferry over to Tarumizu, across the bay, and rode my bike a few miles up the valley. From the end of the road, I started walking up the river. There were several large pools and I had to swim upstream at times. I went up for about three hours and had a great time swimming, walking or climbing higher. I eventually reached a steep gorge that was blocked off by a huge boulder with water pouring over it. There was a small hole off to the side that I am sure I could of crawl/climbed through, but there was a dead and rotting deer or pig carcass wedged in the hole and I did not feel like picking it out. Maybe it will be gone by next summer and I can try again.
On the 17th of July, I flew to Boston to start off five weeks of vacation in America. I had my usual enjoyable visit with my Dad, Elizabeth and Emily. Emily and I played games and my father and I went to lots of movies and restaurants. On the 19th, Dad and Emily and I went to see the U.S. Mens National Soccer Team play Cuba as part of the CONCACAF Gold Cup. Landon Donavon scored three goals and helped lead the US to a 6-1 victory. But, perhaps more exciting, was the crowd warming up for the following game between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. While the US was racking up the points, the fans for the next game were marching around with drums and cheering in anticipation.
After a family reunion softball game, I went to stay with Milo in New York City. I had a good time hanging out there and ate lots of good food in "The City." I also got to see a bunch of my favorite friends. Susie was in Baltimore for a family reunion and was able to spare an afternoon for me. Sue and her new family were in town and we had a pizza dinner and some ice cream. Matt and his girlfriend were around and we went to an interesting show. It was staged in and around a pool on the roof of a hotel.
After a fun week of hanging out with Milo, I went to New Jersey. I had a great visit with Josh, Nancy, Aunt Anne, and UNCLE JIM. I watched him play the guitar and sing in a cafe with his brother and friends. We also enjoyed our annual game of pitch and putt golf. His recent back surgery did not slow him down at all and I lost, like always.
On the 3rd of August, I flew down to Florida. I spent a few weeks sitting on the couch, watching TV and eating my mother's cooking. I also found time to visit my cousins and grandparents. I left for Japan again on the 21st and arrived on the 23rd. Those two days of travel also included a fun six hours in Korea. I brought back about 100 pounds of food from my mother and have been enjoying it ever since.
Once back in Japan, I had a week in the office to goof off and then it was back to school and the start of the second tri-mester. After the first week of school, I went back to Hayato town for the annual sailing race. We had a bit more wind than last year and sailed well. The race was followed by some swimming, a big bbq lunch and a nap in my hammock.
In addition to the three schools I visited last year, I have a new one to go to this year. It is very small and far away, so I only go one or two times per month. Suzuyama Junior High School is 13 miles from my house, and up a big mountain. It takes me about an hour and a half to ride my bike there. The first 30 minutes is through the city, but the final hour is a long hard climb through small mountain roads. A great way to start the day. The ride home takes well under an hour.
There are only 16 students in the whole junior high school. Only two in the 7th grade. But, as with every other class in every other school, the teacher says "Good morning everyone" at the start of each lesson. I am hoping that one of the two girls is absent some day so I can see if he still says "Good morning everyone." At lunch time, all of the teachers and students eat together in one classroom.
Because there are so few students, the school is combined with a 24 student elementary school. So, I will get to visit them as well and play lots of games with a bunch of little kids.
On the 12th of September, I flew up to Tokyo. My friends Karla and Daniel, from Colorado, flew in and I met them in the airport. The next day, we took lots of different trains to the Mt. Fuji area and then a taxi to the end of the road, half way up the mountain. We got there in the very late afternoon and it was windy and cold and getting dark. We started hiking up. After a bit over two hours and a little bit of rain and a lot of cold, we came to the eighth station and our home for the night.
In the little mountain hut, we ate dinner. At least I ate dinner. Karla can be a little picky sometimes and even Daniel could not stomach all of the new Japanese food. After that, it was time for bed. In this mountain hut, the bed room consisted of a two tiered section of floor about six feet wide and twenty feet long. We were crammed in there, head to toes, with a lot of other people, including some very loud snorers. I was wedged between two strange men with very smelly feet. I did not sleep much that night. We had no trouble being up and ready to go before 2:00 am.
In the middle of the night, we started climbing again. There were occasional large groups of Japanese following a guide. The guides always had two foot long red LED light sticks and looked liked they should be directing traffic on at a construction sight, not climbing a mountain. We got to the top of the 12,290 foot peak of the volcano about an hour before sunrise. We waited in the cold, with the gathering crowd to watch the sunrise. We were lucky with the weather and watched the sunrise over a beautiful clear day. After a few hours of running down hill, we were back at the starting point and ready to catch a bus back to Tokyo. It was a great bus ride, but I don't remember a thing. I slept the whole ride.
Once back in Tokyo, I headed to the Shinjuku area and one of the uniquely Japanese experiences that I had been looking forward to for a very long time. I went to a capsule hotel. Capsule hotels are designed for business men who miss the last train home and must sleep in the city or for people who go out drinking and need a place to crash. I checked in at the front desk and was given a locker key. I went to the locker and found my small blue robe and pair of blue boxer shorts waiting for me. I changed into the hotel guest clothing and put the rest of my luggage into the storeroom. Next, I checked out my capsule.
I went down to floor with my capsule and found number 3142. It was near the end of a long hallway and it was an upper bunk. The capsule itself was about three feet high, three feet wide and six feet long. A little big, but still comfortable. I crawled in and checked out the small tv and radio. The light controls also worked well.
Down the hallway from my "room", was a lounge. They had some video games, drink machines and a tv. A bunch of men were sitting around in their boxers and robes, smoking and watching tv. I went up a few flights of stairs, past the lockers and saunas, to the fifth floor. There was a restaurant there with lots of men sitting around and eating and watching tv, all wearing the blue shorts and short robes, except for the me who did not wear medium sized boxers. The large size boxers were bright orange. I enjoyed the feeling of walking through a small city where everybody was dressed the same.
Next to the restaurant was a massage room. I went up another flight of stairs to the hot spring level. They also had a barber shop and big area with all sorts of hair and body tonics, blow dryers and combs and mirrors. To the left was a big room with lots of small taps to wash yourself at. There was also a large central pool for soaking. I washed up and then went through to the other side of the floor. There was another big hot pool for soaking and small Japanese women who gave massages and walked on your back, for an extra fee. I went past them into the sauna and watched tv in there for a while. Then it was time for the extra special feature of the city center seventh floor hot spring - the outside bath. The view was nothing special, being of only the tops of a few nearby buildings, but the water was nice and hot and it was a good night to be outside soaking.
When it was time for bed, which was early for me because I had not slept at all the night before, I went back to my capsule and crawled in. The roll down door of wooden slats let in a bit too much light, so I hung my blanket over the door and it got dark enough to sleep comfortably. I was worried that when all the drunk people came in later, that they would wake me, but I never heard a peep. I woke up the next day at 4:30 to catch a bus to the airport and the hotel was full of people who had come in during the night and not made any noise.
On September 15th (Respect for the Aged Day), I flew back to Kagoshima and met Karla and Daniel there. I was excited to have my friends here for a week and couldn't wait to show them many of my favorite things. With Rie, we went straight to some whirly noodles for lunch. That afternoon we visited the local gardens. For the rest of the week we went to the beach, played in the river near Tarumizu, went to the samurai houses and Kamikaze museum in Chiran, went to the Sakurajima volcano and explored the city. I also introduced them to all sorts of good and fun Japanese restaurants. It was a great visit and I was sorry to see them go after a week.
Karla was nice enough to bring me a chain removal tool for me to use on my bike. The day after they left, I spent a few hours completely dis-assembling my bike. The next day, I cleaned each part and spent over eight hours putting it all back together. I only had one small piece left over when I was done. Not too bad, if I do say so myself. Of course, not all was perfect on the bike and I spent the next week or so fine tuning all of the little adjustments. On my 30 mile ride the next Saturday, I had to stop every few miles to turn a screw or adjust a knob. But, eventually, everything was back to tip top and sparkling clean shape. And now, I have more confidence in the workings of my bike and my ability to repair it. Confidence and skill that will be important in my proposed three month crossing of Japan from north to south by bike next summer.
On the 4th of October, I went on a long hike with a bunch of teachers from Wada JHS. We climbed Mt. Takachiho, the highest mountain around. It was a long and enjoyable climb. We were lucky with the weather and had a great view from the top. After a soak in a nearby hot spring, we went back to one of the teachers houses for a dinner party. The teachers husband teaches German at the local university, but also spoke excellent English. I ate a lot of good food with them, while they drank a lot of wine.
On the 11th of October, I loaded up my bike and went off for a three day ride. I took the ferry to Tarumizu and started riding east. Over the summer, when I went home, I bought a little computer for my bike, so now I can keep track of all sorts of useless information while I ride. I rode east for about 50 miles, through mountains and rain. I spent that night camping in my new tent in one of the ever present perfectly groomed groves of cedar trees that are found everywhere in Japan. The next day I rode east to Nichinan on the east coast and then turned around and started back west for a good 75 mile day in the pouring rain. I camped near one of the "Top 100" waterfalls in Japan near Miyakanojo City. On the Monday, I rode the 55 miles back home. I had to come down a big hill at one point and my top speed for the weekend was 73 kmh (about 45 miles per hour). I really enjoy blowing by scooters and even passing cars on the down hill streches. Of course, on the 4 mile an hour uphills, the opposite happens.
Last Saturday, the 18th, I rode the 30 miles down to Ibusuki Town. From there I rode the 26 mile route for the Nanohana Marathon that I hope to run in January. Then I came back to Kagoshima. Usually, on my weekend rides, I avoid the busier roads, but I was in a hurry to get to and from Ibusuki, so I rode along the main road. The combination of sun screen a 86 miles of busy roads left me covered in black soot and reminded me why I don't like roads with lots of trucks and busses.
Yesterday, Rie and I drove back up to the Kirishima/Makizono area of national park and hot springs. I had obtained some sketchy directions to a free hot spring in the mountains and we decided to try to find it. Rie was a bit worried because the directions basically said to drive by some noxious gas and other dangers warning signs, park at the next set of warning signs, hike twenty minutes to the final set of big warning signs and then go down towards the steaming and boiling water in the river. But, when we finally got there (after a couple of false starts) there was other people already soaking in the river, so Rie felt a bit more comfortable.
There was stinky sulferous smoke all over the place and big sections of boiling water in the river. The first place I tried to get in was too close and way too hot. We tried downstream a little ways and the water temperature was perfect. The water was full of grey ash and small red worms but neither detered us from a nice long soak. For those of you who may remember some of my adventures in Nepal, Chile and Colorado, you well know that one of my greatest pleasures is to hike to hot springs in the mountains and soak there. I finally found a place to do that in Japan and it was great. I am hoping that it snows there this winter and we can return.
I found a 16 week training schedule for the marathon and am busy running almost every day in training. So, the rest of my weekends for this year will be spent running or resting. No more time for big bike rides until January. I thought that with all of this running, I might lose some weight, but that does not seem to have happened. Also, I still go to the gym twice a week to lift some weights. I thought that with all of this working out in the gym, I would have gained some weight, but that does not seem to be happening either.
Wednesday, April 9, 2003
A few more months worth of observations
Well, it has been a little while since my last update, so it is about time to tell you how much fun I am still having here in Japan. But, before I start, I want to make sure everyone understands how unqualified I am to teach English as a foreign language. When I was in High School, I studied Spanish as a foreign language. I mis-behaved so much that after being kicked out of class three times in one year, I was not allowed to return to class for a week and had to go to in-school detention instead. Also, in High School, I failed English and had to go to summer school. In University, I only took one English course. It was during the summer and the teacher was had just received his PhD and was getting ready to move to a new state to start his first job. He had no time for us. We did about a third of the work that was technically required. So, with my experiences as a student of English and as a student of a foreign language in mind, please enjoy my latest update.
In February, my boss asked me to visit an elementary school on Friday nights to teach English. The Little Cherries Jazz and Swing Band of Tamae Elementary school will visit Iowa in June. The 22 members of the band want to learn some conversational English before their trip. So, once a week, I visit the school and play games with the students for an hour. I really enjoy it. The kids are very motivated make a real effort to learn during the class. Also, there is no JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) with me, so I have to plan everything and run the class by myself. That is fun. We play a lot of games and after class, one of the mothers gives me an envelope with about $50 in it, which is great because that is about twice the normal rate for an hour of English lessons. I went to their concert a few weeks ago and was very impressed. I have not listened to that much Glenn Miller since Grandma and Grandpa drove me to Space Camp in the mid-80s.
We had a three-day weekend in March and I went for my first bike/camp trip of the spring. I rode down to Cape Sata, the southernmost point in mainland Japan. From there, I explored the hills of the Osumi Peninsula. On the final day, I went to a great onsen (hot spring) in the hills overlooking Kinko Bay, Sakurajima Volcano and Kagoshima City. It was a great bike trip and I am looking forward to many more weekend getaways in the coming months.
Also in March, I competed in another 10km race and finished in just over 50 minutes. Two weeks later, I rode my bike for three hours to Kaseda town. I spent the night there and the next day I competed in the Kaseda Duathalon. The race consisted of a one mile run, a ten-mile bike ride and another one mile run. Everyone else had fancy racing bikes as opposed to my fancy touring bike. I am sure that my bike weighed at least twice as much as any other bike there.
I did well on the first run and then came the bike ride. I felt like I was not doing too poorly, even though many people passed me. We were supposed to ride around the park five times, but I forgot to count. When I figured I had finished my fifth lap, I got off the bike and did the final run. Near the end, I passed a 72 year old man who was walking. That was when I was convinced that I had done six laps of the park, instead of the five required. If I were a woman, I still would have come in third place, but in the men갽s category, I was beaten by some of my 13 year old Junior High School students. So, now I have it easy for next year. Everybody else must train harder to improve their times. All I have to do is learn to count to five and I can knock about seven minutes off of my time.
After the race, everybody else put their bikes into their cars and drove home. It seems I was the only one faced with a thirty-mile bike ride back home. And I had to go quickly, because it was my once a month dinner with the landlord night.
I mentioned in February that the third grade students at my Junior High Schools were busy taking tests to get into High School. They finished their testing by mid-March. Then we had a graduation ceremony. I shaved off my winter beard and wore a jacket and tie to the ceremony. The students said I looked "dandy." As the graduates left school, the younger students gave them flowers. The graduating boys gave buttons off of their jackets to younger girls whom they liked. The popular boys ended up with no buttons at all and some even gave away their jackets and shirts. For and hour, they all knew what it feels like to be a rock star or an ALT.
A week later, we had a closing ceremony for the two remaining grades. They were given the normal anti-smoking and anti-two people on a bike lectures and sent home for spring break. This was the end of the school year and they all had a one week break before moving up to the next grade. For one week they had no classes. They only had to come to school for half a day to practice their club activities.
In Kagoshima, the public schools have a better reputation than the private ones, so most students try to go there. Those that do not pass the tests or the interviews go to private schools. The schools often have specialties as well, such as academics, business, agriculture or mechanics.
Compulsory and free education ends with Junior High School. Some students choose not to go to High School. Others fail the tests and do not get accepted, so even if they want to go to High School, they can not. A few of my favorite bad students were unable to get accepted anywhere, so I will look for them working the late shift at a convenience store or a gas station. They do not make exceptions or allowances. I have an ALT friend with a daughter who is 16. She was raised in America, but has lived here for two years. Needless to say, she has limited Japanese. She was unable to pass the tests for High School and will now have to be home schooled.
It is common practice in the Japanese government to move people around every few years, especially among teachers in Kagoshima. There are many remote islands in this prefecture and in order to get teachers into every school, the Board of Education reassigns each teacher every three to six years. Near the end of Spring Break, the newspapers published the names and schools of all the moving teachers in the prefecture. It seems that about a quarter of all teachers move each year. And when I say, move, I don't just mean across town. The normal move is to one of the islands, 12 hours away by ferry. The teachers had one week from when they found out to pack up and move. On March 31st ,all of the teachers were in their old schools. On April 1st, they were supposed to be in their new schools, ready to work.
The remaining teachers made themselves useful by assisting in the moving, going to the port to wave goodbye and welcoming the new teachers.
In the space of two weeks, we had ceremonies for third grade graduation, for the end of the school year, to say goodbye to old teachers, to welcome new students to the school and a combined starting and new teachers ceremony. They really like their speeches and ceremonies here.
Some schools have an additional ceremony. After the normal third grade graduation there is a special ceremony in the Principal's office for the graduating students who never came to school. In Japanese schools no one fails and no one is held back.
At my Board of Education office about half of the Japanese staff were reassigned. We had one going away party, and the next week, we had a welcome party. They were the now familiar all you can drink and tons of fishy Japanese dishes to eat with some speeches and silliness. Our new OL (office lady - the one who makes tea) is only 18. She finished High School two weeks ago and is already working. Her introductory speech was interrupted several times by drunken middle-aged men (co-workers) yelling "cute."
For many years I have traveled and slept on peoples couches. Now that I have my own place, I want lots of people to come and visit me. Sort of a karma thing. I joined a JET home stay group and have had 15 house guests so far. Many of them I have never met. They contact me by email and often want to stay over on long weekends when I go away. I just leave my place open and when I get home there is a nice thank you card and a gift on my table. The ones I have met have been great. They usually leave me some food, and are fun to talk to. I did have one house guest that wasn't part of the JET program. Timothy is a 16 year old German exchange student living in Nagasaki. He felt too constrained by Japanese life and took off on a one-week trip around Kagoshima. I found him sleeping in the park one morning and invited him home for the night. He was a nice kid, I hope he is having fun back in Nagasaki.
At one of my schools, the students had to write poems in English. Most wrote about flowers, the sea, the sky or summer. A few of my favorite poems were about English. Here they are.
English Class It's sweet lullaby It's take me to Dream World
School Study hard Play with my friends So happy place
Sleepy How Sleepy!! I want to sleep very much
Now its English Class I want to go home soon
My Japanese language classes continue to challenge me, but I am making progress. I had to make a speech in Japanese at one of the closing ceremonies and everyone told me that I did a good job. In my last update, I forgot to mention that my new favorite Japanese word was "tabemono". It means "eat thing", which means food. I have since learned that many nouns in Japanese are made by combining a verb with the word "thing." For example, shopping is "buy thing". But, my new favorite word is "kuinigeshimasu" and it is a verb that means "to run away with out paying for your food." I just love the idea that they actually have a word that means all that.
There is another thing about Japanese that I really like. You can end a sentence with "Yo." "Yo" means that the preceding sentence had some new or interesting information in it. It is commonly used. It is quite normal to say "Nice weather today, Yo." I feel like I am Hip-Hop or Rap star when I speak.
I am still struggling to learn Kanji. It is more annoying now. Before I could ignore them all, but now I have to try to read them, because I just may understand one or two. My teacher gives me 50 new kanji to learn each week, so now I literally know a dozen of them. It is much more frustrating now because I can recognize more than a hundred of them, but all I can say is "I studied that one and now I have no idea what it means." I should have taken Art Appreciation in university. That would have helped.
I have a bunch of random observations that I will now share with you.
My favorite sushi place had a sale last week. Normally, a plate of sushi starts at about one dollar. They had a 50% off sale. Sushi for less than 50 cents per plate. It was great. I pigged out on sushi for under $4, three days in a row.
In class, each student is given a number. Boys start with number one and go up from there. Girls start with number 50. Teachers often call students by their numbers.
When one students is forced to stand up and answer a question, the students around her will loudly whisper the answer.
The students must copy large portions of their textbooks into workbooks. This is their homework. Teachers must check the work, but it is very boring. They just put a big red circle on each page. Often. the students do the checking. One opens the book and the other stamps the date onto the page. They are very efficient, and since they don't actually read the homework, they can check all 40 books in under five minutes.
Every month or so I seem to wonder about another aspect of the Japanese people and use my class room time to check my theories. For two months I looked for a left handed kid before actually finding two. Recently, I have been looking for a girl who pulls her hair back into a ponytail with no bangs. I have not found yet one. They have three approved hair styles in Junior High School; a single rear pony tail, two pony tails (one on each side) or short hair (above the collar). Of course, the hair must be black.
Just about every thing comes wrapped in plastic. The plastic pouches are always easy to open. They have an arrow pointing to a small slit in the side where you are supposed to start opening it from.
Many people ride small bikes to work. But, it seems that bikes are considered more like pedestrians than vehicles. The bikes must drive on the side walk. Bike riders often do the same activities as walkers, which means using cell phones, smoking cigarettes and holding an umbrella. I am waiting to see what happens when a cigarette smoking bike rider in the rain gets a phone call.
During cold season it is normal for sick people to wear little cotton masks so as not to contaminate anybody else. Very considerate.
Every student has a pencil case filled with pencils, erasers, staplers and pens. Each case is decorated with photos, stickers and graffiti. They usually have small toys hanging off the ends.
There is a style of noodle called soumen. It is like soba, a brown buckwheat noodle. In the summer, it is popular to go to special restaurants in the country to eat it. They have donut shaped tables. In the table is a whirlpool of water. You drop the noodles in, watch them swirl around for as long as you like and then catch them with chopsticks. They come with a soy sauce and wasabi dipping sauce and are very tasty. I like playing with my food.
In the countryside, I have observed many small video stores. I decided to have a look inside one. They are very small and usually located along the road. Inside are a bunch of vending machines with videos for rent. They are all porn.
When you walk into any business, they yell "irashaimase." It means "welcome", but it can be pretty annoying when every waitress yells it at the top of her super-high voice.
Most restaurants have a plastic display of their food out front. The displays are incredibly realistic. I have been most impressed.
Sometimes a student forgets his text book for class. He will just sit there and stare straight ahead. It will never occur to him to share with his neighbor and usually the teacher will not suggest this either.
When the students write in English, they often don't leave spaces between the words and break words in funny places at the end of the line. This is perfectly acceptable in Japanese and part of what makes Japanese difficult for me. But in English, it makes for some hard reading.
In Elementary school, it is popular for little boys to sneak up behind someone and poke their fingers up their butt while yelling "suppository." Unfortunately, some of the Junior High School students have not yet outgrown this game.
The Japanese use both the western calendar to count years and their own. The native Japanese calendar starts at one whenever there is a new Emperor. It is currently year 15 here. The previous Emperor lived a long time. So, it turns out that I was born in year 46 of the Showa era. It is fun to tell people that I was born in 46, especially if they get confused and think that I mean 1946 in the western calendar.
Public toilets do not have paper towels. You are supposed to carry around your own handkerchief for wiping your hands after washing them. Judging by the number of wet hand-prints on men's backsides when they come out of the bathroom, not everyone carries around their own towels.
I went to the Kamikazi museum in Chiran town. They had pictures of each of the 1066 kamikazi pilots of World War II, as well as their final letters home and some other memorabilia of those "that gave their lives for freedom."
Garbage. They have a difficult system for dealing with it here. There are about ten different classifications for it and every one must sort their garbage before bringing out to the collection points in the street. I have not figured out the whole system, so I just have separate bags for bottles, cans, plastics and paper and foodstuffs. Technically, you are supposed to put everything into its own clear plastic bag and write your name and address on the outside, in case someone finds a forbidden item in the bag. I have some friends in the country who are so afraid that they only bring out their trash in the middle of the night, every few months. Luckily, there is a garbage room in my building and I don갽t have to wait until garbage day to drop off my bags.
Since they separate trash, they must have many different garbage cans. Stores and cities seem reluctant to place public trash cans because if they put one out they have to put five or six out. There is a severe shortage of public trash cans. Convenience stores usually have trash cans and so do some bigger parks, but that is about it. It is not uncommon to walk around with a piece of trash until I get home. Even toilets don't have trash cans.
I learned early on in my visit to never make a tape or a video of myself because then people will laugh at me for years to come. Well, last month I was asked to make a video and here it is.
I know I sound stupid, but remember, my intended audience is young Japanese people that don't understand any English. This five-minute speech is the one I have given more than 50 times. It is my now standard self -introduction.
A training vessel from the Spanish Navy was in town for a week. Many of the High School Girls and female ALTs were very excited. The sailors all wore sailor outfits. That is also the uniform for school girls. I sometimes had trouble telling them apart, especially the High School girls and the female sailors.
That's all for now.
In February, my boss asked me to visit an elementary school on Friday nights to teach English. The Little Cherries Jazz and Swing Band of Tamae Elementary school will visit Iowa in June. The 22 members of the band want to learn some conversational English before their trip. So, once a week, I visit the school and play games with the students for an hour. I really enjoy it. The kids are very motivated make a real effort to learn during the class. Also, there is no JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) with me, so I have to plan everything and run the class by myself. That is fun. We play a lot of games and after class, one of the mothers gives me an envelope with about $50 in it, which is great because that is about twice the normal rate for an hour of English lessons. I went to their concert a few weeks ago and was very impressed. I have not listened to that much Glenn Miller since Grandma and Grandpa drove me to Space Camp in the mid-80s.
We had a three-day weekend in March and I went for my first bike/camp trip of the spring. I rode down to Cape Sata, the southernmost point in mainland Japan. From there, I explored the hills of the Osumi Peninsula. On the final day, I went to a great onsen (hot spring) in the hills overlooking Kinko Bay, Sakurajima Volcano and Kagoshima City. It was a great bike trip and I am looking forward to many more weekend getaways in the coming months.
Also in March, I competed in another 10km race and finished in just over 50 minutes. Two weeks later, I rode my bike for three hours to Kaseda town. I spent the night there and the next day I competed in the Kaseda Duathalon. The race consisted of a one mile run, a ten-mile bike ride and another one mile run. Everyone else had fancy racing bikes as opposed to my fancy touring bike. I am sure that my bike weighed at least twice as much as any other bike there.
I did well on the first run and then came the bike ride. I felt like I was not doing too poorly, even though many people passed me. We were supposed to ride around the park five times, but I forgot to count. When I figured I had finished my fifth lap, I got off the bike and did the final run. Near the end, I passed a 72 year old man who was walking. That was when I was convinced that I had done six laps of the park, instead of the five required. If I were a woman, I still would have come in third place, but in the men갽s category, I was beaten by some of my 13 year old Junior High School students. So, now I have it easy for next year. Everybody else must train harder to improve their times. All I have to do is learn to count to five and I can knock about seven minutes off of my time.
After the race, everybody else put their bikes into their cars and drove home. It seems I was the only one faced with a thirty-mile bike ride back home. And I had to go quickly, because it was my once a month dinner with the landlord night.
I mentioned in February that the third grade students at my Junior High Schools were busy taking tests to get into High School. They finished their testing by mid-March. Then we had a graduation ceremony. I shaved off my winter beard and wore a jacket and tie to the ceremony. The students said I looked "dandy." As the graduates left school, the younger students gave them flowers. The graduating boys gave buttons off of their jackets to younger girls whom they liked. The popular boys ended up with no buttons at all and some even gave away their jackets and shirts. For and hour, they all knew what it feels like to be a rock star or an ALT.
A week later, we had a closing ceremony for the two remaining grades. They were given the normal anti-smoking and anti-two people on a bike lectures and sent home for spring break. This was the end of the school year and they all had a one week break before moving up to the next grade. For one week they had no classes. They only had to come to school for half a day to practice their club activities.
In Kagoshima, the public schools have a better reputation than the private ones, so most students try to go there. Those that do not pass the tests or the interviews go to private schools. The schools often have specialties as well, such as academics, business, agriculture or mechanics.
Compulsory and free education ends with Junior High School. Some students choose not to go to High School. Others fail the tests and do not get accepted, so even if they want to go to High School, they can not. A few of my favorite bad students were unable to get accepted anywhere, so I will look for them working the late shift at a convenience store or a gas station. They do not make exceptions or allowances. I have an ALT friend with a daughter who is 16. She was raised in America, but has lived here for two years. Needless to say, she has limited Japanese. She was unable to pass the tests for High School and will now have to be home schooled.
It is common practice in the Japanese government to move people around every few years, especially among teachers in Kagoshima. There are many remote islands in this prefecture and in order to get teachers into every school, the Board of Education reassigns each teacher every three to six years. Near the end of Spring Break, the newspapers published the names and schools of all the moving teachers in the prefecture. It seems that about a quarter of all teachers move each year. And when I say, move, I don't just mean across town. The normal move is to one of the islands, 12 hours away by ferry. The teachers had one week from when they found out to pack up and move. On March 31st ,all of the teachers were in their old schools. On April 1st, they were supposed to be in their new schools, ready to work.
The remaining teachers made themselves useful by assisting in the moving, going to the port to wave goodbye and welcoming the new teachers.
In the space of two weeks, we had ceremonies for third grade graduation, for the end of the school year, to say goodbye to old teachers, to welcome new students to the school and a combined starting and new teachers ceremony. They really like their speeches and ceremonies here.
Some schools have an additional ceremony. After the normal third grade graduation there is a special ceremony in the Principal's office for the graduating students who never came to school. In Japanese schools no one fails and no one is held back.
At my Board of Education office about half of the Japanese staff were reassigned. We had one going away party, and the next week, we had a welcome party. They were the now familiar all you can drink and tons of fishy Japanese dishes to eat with some speeches and silliness. Our new OL (office lady - the one who makes tea) is only 18. She finished High School two weeks ago and is already working. Her introductory speech was interrupted several times by drunken middle-aged men (co-workers) yelling "cute."
For many years I have traveled and slept on peoples couches. Now that I have my own place, I want lots of people to come and visit me. Sort of a karma thing. I joined a JET home stay group and have had 15 house guests so far. Many of them I have never met. They contact me by email and often want to stay over on long weekends when I go away. I just leave my place open and when I get home there is a nice thank you card and a gift on my table. The ones I have met have been great. They usually leave me some food, and are fun to talk to. I did have one house guest that wasn't part of the JET program. Timothy is a 16 year old German exchange student living in Nagasaki. He felt too constrained by Japanese life and took off on a one-week trip around Kagoshima. I found him sleeping in the park one morning and invited him home for the night. He was a nice kid, I hope he is having fun back in Nagasaki.
At one of my schools, the students had to write poems in English. Most wrote about flowers, the sea, the sky or summer. A few of my favorite poems were about English. Here they are.
English Class It's sweet lullaby It's take me to Dream World
School Study hard Play with my friends So happy place
Sleepy How Sleepy!! I want to sleep very much
Now its English Class I want to go home soon
My Japanese language classes continue to challenge me, but I am making progress. I had to make a speech in Japanese at one of the closing ceremonies and everyone told me that I did a good job. In my last update, I forgot to mention that my new favorite Japanese word was "tabemono". It means "eat thing", which means food. I have since learned that many nouns in Japanese are made by combining a verb with the word "thing." For example, shopping is "buy thing". But, my new favorite word is "kuinigeshimasu" and it is a verb that means "to run away with out paying for your food." I just love the idea that they actually have a word that means all that.
There is another thing about Japanese that I really like. You can end a sentence with "Yo." "Yo" means that the preceding sentence had some new or interesting information in it. It is commonly used. It is quite normal to say "Nice weather today, Yo." I feel like I am Hip-Hop or Rap star when I speak.
I am still struggling to learn Kanji. It is more annoying now. Before I could ignore them all, but now I have to try to read them, because I just may understand one or two. My teacher gives me 50 new kanji to learn each week, so now I literally know a dozen of them. It is much more frustrating now because I can recognize more than a hundred of them, but all I can say is "I studied that one and now I have no idea what it means." I should have taken Art Appreciation in university. That would have helped.
I have a bunch of random observations that I will now share with you.
My favorite sushi place had a sale last week. Normally, a plate of sushi starts at about one dollar. They had a 50% off sale. Sushi for less than 50 cents per plate. It was great. I pigged out on sushi for under $4, three days in a row.
In class, each student is given a number. Boys start with number one and go up from there. Girls start with number 50. Teachers often call students by their numbers.
When one students is forced to stand up and answer a question, the students around her will loudly whisper the answer.
The students must copy large portions of their textbooks into workbooks. This is their homework. Teachers must check the work, but it is very boring. They just put a big red circle on each page. Often. the students do the checking. One opens the book and the other stamps the date onto the page. They are very efficient, and since they don't actually read the homework, they can check all 40 books in under five minutes.
Every month or so I seem to wonder about another aspect of the Japanese people and use my class room time to check my theories. For two months I looked for a left handed kid before actually finding two. Recently, I have been looking for a girl who pulls her hair back into a ponytail with no bangs. I have not found yet one. They have three approved hair styles in Junior High School; a single rear pony tail, two pony tails (one on each side) or short hair (above the collar). Of course, the hair must be black.
Just about every thing comes wrapped in plastic. The plastic pouches are always easy to open. They have an arrow pointing to a small slit in the side where you are supposed to start opening it from.
Many people ride small bikes to work. But, it seems that bikes are considered more like pedestrians than vehicles. The bikes must drive on the side walk. Bike riders often do the same activities as walkers, which means using cell phones, smoking cigarettes and holding an umbrella. I am waiting to see what happens when a cigarette smoking bike rider in the rain gets a phone call.
During cold season it is normal for sick people to wear little cotton masks so as not to contaminate anybody else. Very considerate.
Every student has a pencil case filled with pencils, erasers, staplers and pens. Each case is decorated with photos, stickers and graffiti. They usually have small toys hanging off the ends.
There is a style of noodle called soumen. It is like soba, a brown buckwheat noodle. In the summer, it is popular to go to special restaurants in the country to eat it. They have donut shaped tables. In the table is a whirlpool of water. You drop the noodles in, watch them swirl around for as long as you like and then catch them with chopsticks. They come with a soy sauce and wasabi dipping sauce and are very tasty. I like playing with my food.
In the countryside, I have observed many small video stores. I decided to have a look inside one. They are very small and usually located along the road. Inside are a bunch of vending machines with videos for rent. They are all porn.
When you walk into any business, they yell "irashaimase." It means "welcome", but it can be pretty annoying when every waitress yells it at the top of her super-high voice.
Most restaurants have a plastic display of their food out front. The displays are incredibly realistic. I have been most impressed.
Sometimes a student forgets his text book for class. He will just sit there and stare straight ahead. It will never occur to him to share with his neighbor and usually the teacher will not suggest this either.
When the students write in English, they often don't leave spaces between the words and break words in funny places at the end of the line. This is perfectly acceptable in Japanese and part of what makes Japanese difficult for me. But in English, it makes for some hard reading.
In Elementary school, it is popular for little boys to sneak up behind someone and poke their fingers up their butt while yelling "suppository." Unfortunately, some of the Junior High School students have not yet outgrown this game.
The Japanese use both the western calendar to count years and their own. The native Japanese calendar starts at one whenever there is a new Emperor. It is currently year 15 here. The previous Emperor lived a long time. So, it turns out that I was born in year 46 of the Showa era. It is fun to tell people that I was born in 46, especially if they get confused and think that I mean 1946 in the western calendar.
Public toilets do not have paper towels. You are supposed to carry around your own handkerchief for wiping your hands after washing them. Judging by the number of wet hand-prints on men's backsides when they come out of the bathroom, not everyone carries around their own towels.
I went to the Kamikazi museum in Chiran town. They had pictures of each of the 1066 kamikazi pilots of World War II, as well as their final letters home and some other memorabilia of those "that gave their lives for freedom."
Garbage. They have a difficult system for dealing with it here. There are about ten different classifications for it and every one must sort their garbage before bringing out to the collection points in the street. I have not figured out the whole system, so I just have separate bags for bottles, cans, plastics and paper and foodstuffs. Technically, you are supposed to put everything into its own clear plastic bag and write your name and address on the outside, in case someone finds a forbidden item in the bag. I have some friends in the country who are so afraid that they only bring out their trash in the middle of the night, every few months. Luckily, there is a garbage room in my building and I don갽t have to wait until garbage day to drop off my bags.
Since they separate trash, they must have many different garbage cans. Stores and cities seem reluctant to place public trash cans because if they put one out they have to put five or six out. There is a severe shortage of public trash cans. Convenience stores usually have trash cans and so do some bigger parks, but that is about it. It is not uncommon to walk around with a piece of trash until I get home. Even toilets don't have trash cans.
I learned early on in my visit to never make a tape or a video of myself because then people will laugh at me for years to come. Well, last month I was asked to make a video and here it is.
I know I sound stupid, but remember, my intended audience is young Japanese people that don't understand any English. This five-minute speech is the one I have given more than 50 times. It is my now standard self -introduction.
A training vessel from the Spanish Navy was in town for a week. Many of the High School Girls and female ALTs were very excited. The sailors all wore sailor outfits. That is also the uniform for school girls. I sometimes had trouble telling them apart, especially the High School girls and the female sailors.
That's all for now.
Saturday, February 1, 2003
A few more months worth of freedays and observations.
Hello again from the Land of the Rising Sun, as the Chinese dubbed the country many centuries ago.
As you might expect, I have been very busy since my last update in November. School life has settled into a comfortable routine. I ride to school and get there at about 8:30 in the morning. I help teach a few classes in the morning and usually have an hour or two free to study Japanese. I eat lunch in a different class room everyday. The students are always excited to see me enter the room at lunch time. Sometimes they talk to me, sometimes they don't. After lunch there is a free period, and I have begun playing Shogi with the students.
Shogi is the Japanese version of chess. It is very similar to chess, so I was able to figure it out quickly. In some ways I like it more than chess. When you capture an opponent's piece, you can put it back on the board for your own side. In one of my school's the students are not allowed to play games, but in the other two, I enjoy a game or two of Shogi before my final class of the day. Then, I head home and go to the gym or Tai Chi or rock climbing or Japanese class.
At school, I have settled into a routine with my teachers. Some only use me to stand up there and read an occasional sentence. Others like me to do a five or ten minute warm up activity before standing up there and reading an occasional sentence. A few make an effort to never use the text book when I am there and plan fun activities for the whole class. A couple of others always ask me what I have planned and let me run the whole 50 minute class.
I no longer visit third grade student classes. They are too busy for fun and games. They will all take the entrance examinations for High School during the next five weeks. The examinations for the private High Schools started yesterday and continue through the 8th of March, when the public school test is given. This is a very big deal to them and they have spent a lot of time studying.
On Thursday, at Kamoike Junior High School, the students were given a large pile of papers describing how to behave and what to do during this weekends testing. For an hour, they were told a million little details over the loud speaker. They were told to get a good night rest, to eat breakfast, to take public transport to the test, wear a clean uniform, make sure no buttons are missing, use the toilet at home before they go, bring their own slippers, not to fight with students from other schools at the test site, cut their finger nails, call the homeroom teacher as soon as they get home and not to eat during breaks. They had so many rules to remember that I will be surprised if there is any room left in their heads for the actual test material.
Last August I started to learn the Hiragana alphabet. Hiragana is the Japanese writing system used for verb endings, prepositions, pronunciation guides, general "Japanese" words and most non-verb and non-noun parts of speech. It took a while to learn all 46 symbols, but I have got it down pretty well now. In October, I started on Katakana. Katakana is sort of like the printing version of the cursive Hiragana style. Each of the 46 Hiragana symbols has very different Katakana version. Katakana is used for foreign loan words, of which there is a surprising number. Many foods, foreign names, and all of the thousands of borrowed words in Japanese are written in Katakana.
An amazing number of things are written in Katakana. Once I was able to read it, I could understand a lot. The only trick is trying to guess the English word buried in the Japanese pronunciation. There is no way to write the "TH", "L" or "V" sounds in any Japanese writing system, so they have to approximate with "SE", "RA" and "BU" instead. This means that "Love" is written as "Rabu" in Japanese. Some words, like "Aisu Curimu"(ice cream) are easy. Others, like "Hochikisu" (Hodgekiss - the word they use for stapler) are a bit more difficult to figure out.
Finally, I have begun to study Kanji, as well. Kanji is the picture writing system that was borrowed from the Chinese. Kanji is used for people and place names, as well as for verb roots and most nouns. Some of the pictures look like what they are supposed to mean. So, it is easy to read mountain, because it looks like a mountain. Most are much more difficult. There are about 80 basic elements that make up the majority of Kanji characters and I am starting to become familiar with them. I would have to learn about 2000 of the well over 10,000 to read a newspaper. I don't expect to ever read a newspaper.
Ever since the first time I learned to read, over 25 years ago, I have enjoyed reading. As I become familiar with more and more characters in the various Japanese alphabets, it takes me longer and longer to walk down the street. I try to read as much of every sign as I can, so a one block walk can take about 15 minutes as I slowly sound out each letter. I can still hear my mother's voice in my head from 25 years ago encouraging me to look at the word and "sound it out".
Sometimes, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I went to my favorite store in town, Outdoors Station, and found an application for a rock climbing class. There was a lot of undecipherable Kanji on the form, but I could read the parts in Katakana that spoke of rock climbing, middle and expert classes, top-roping and other climbing terms. I signed up and went on the appropriate day. Everyone took turns climbing on the 40 foot wall. I had my turn and only got up about half way before falling off and being caught by the rope. When I got down, one of the other contestants told me "Not to worry, every one does poorly in their first competition." Competition? This was the first I had heard of a competition, I thought it was a class. Needless to say, I came in last place. The next day I bought some climbing shoes and a harness and now I go out to the wall a few times per week to practice.
Speaking of competitive events, I ran in my first 10km (6.2 mile) race in January. I went down to Ibuski for the 22st (22st is their spelling -last year was the 21th and I suppose that next year will be the 23nd) Nanohana Marathon and had a good time. I had stopped training six weeks before due to the cold, so I was well rested. The main event of the day was a marathon, in which about 6,000 people participated. I joined the smaller crowd of nearly 3,000 for the 10 km race. I started in the back, so it took nearly two minutes for me just to get to the starting line.
For the first 5km there were so many people packed into the street, that it was difficult to pass anyone. During the second half of the race, it was still crowded, but I could finally speed up a little bit. I was good and tired by the end, but finished in a decent 52 minutes. After the race, I headed straight to the beach to get buried up to my neck in the naturally heated sand. Then I went back to the road to watch the marathoners finish. Even after five hours, there were still hundreds of them passing by. I have a few more races planned in the next few months and I hope to improve my times. I am making the Nanohana Marathon of 2004 my training goal.
I am still spending one day each weekend on a long bike ride. Click here to see my bike, it is in the Products page, the Great Journey 1. I usually go about 60 or 70 miles in a different direction each week.
I had nine days of free time during the New Year's break. I finally got a chance to take my new bike out for a true test. On the 28th of December, I loaded up my tent, stove, food, camping supplies and bike tools and headed northwest. I knew I was off to a good start when I got to about 2,000 feet above sea level and it started to snow. I came down the other side of the mountain and into the rain. I went almost to Nagashima, in the extreme Northwest part of Kagoshima Prefecture. I camped near the ocean and rode on into Amuksa in the Kumamoto Prefecture the next day. After spending a night near some hot springs, I continued on to Kumamoto City. I saw one of the three best preserved (recently reconstructed) ancient castles of Japan. I also ate the regional specialty -raw horse meat sushi. The neck was white and chewy and not my favorite. The chest meat was tasty and red and well marbled with fat, as they like all their mammal meats here.
Kumamoto is a bigger city than Kagoshima and I saw many things there that we do not have here. They had ATM machines open until mid-night and a Starbucks coffee shop. But I don't miss those things here in Kagoshima. I don't often bank late at night and I don't drink coffee. Besides, we do have Haagen Daaz and Baskin Robbins ice cream shops in Kagoshima.
From Kumamoto, I headed east and camped near Gokase, in Miyazaki Prefecture. I camped near the southernmost ski resort in Japan. The operative part of that phrase was ski resort and not southernmost. It was cold. Then I went to Miyazaki City and Aoshima Island on the east coast of this part of Japan. I soaked in a nice hot spring and then continued south. Along the way I saw some monkeys. At Cape Toi I saw wild horses, but I had no soy sauce, so I left them alone. The whole southern coast of Miyazaki Prefecture is lined with interesting rock formations which I could admire from my bike as I rode through the rain.
After a few days of being cold and wet, I decided to head home early. I ended up riding about 400 miles in eight days. I still like hiking better, but I now think that a bike would be a great way to get from hike to hike on some future multi-month vacation.
I was glad I cut my ride a day short. A few hours after I got home, it snowed for the first time in 16 years in Kagoshima City. It snowed all night and all day the next day. The snow stuck around for about three days and many children had their first snowball fights. On Monday, the little elementary school boys were so cute in their super-short shorts and uniform jackets. None of them strolled to school that day. Nope, they all ran through the snow with their little knees knocking, no doubt looking forward to the days when they will be Junior High School students and will be allowed (required) to wear long pants every day. The girls also looked cold in their skirts, but they will not be allowed to wear tights until they get to High School. But, they can wear shorts under their skirts and as many shirts as will fit under their sailor uniforms.
Last Wednesday, it snowed for the second time in 16 years, as well as the second time this month. It was hard to keep the student's attention in class since they all wanted to watch the snow storm outside the big windows. But, it was fun to watch their breath as they talked. I stole a page from their book and started heavy layering. On the cold days, I now wear long under wear under my pants, and three jackets over my heavy work shirt and undershirts. The class rooms are well ventilated and don't really start to heat up until about 30 minutes after class starts. After it ends, the doors are opened up again as people come and go. Then, the cold comes and the heat goes. The teachers return to the teacher's room and stand around the little kerosene heater with the teapot on top and complain about how cold it is.
For the past two weeks, many students and teachers have been absent. In some classes, as many as 10 students were missing, out of 35. Some schools were closed due to lack of attendance. There has been a bad cold going around, which they call influenza, but I think we just call it the flu in English.
Many students, especially girls, carry around cute washcloth sized towels. In the summer they used them to blot sweat off of their heads. Now, I have discovered that they have a winter use as well. They can blot their nose if anything leaks out. As every good Japanese knows, it is rude and disgusting to blow your nose in a tissue. If you do, you are stuck with a dirty piece of garbage in your hand. No, it is much better to sniffle. The music of 30 people in a room sniffling is truly unique to my experience. The towels are just a back-up, in case gravity proves to be stronger than suction. I have this picture in my head of young Japanese children, sitting in front of the TV when they have a cold and blowing their noses. In my vision, their mothers scold them and say "Stop blowing your nose and just sniffle." I imagine that none of them have experienced the horror of being chased and smothered by a tissue and told to blow.
I mentioned the wonders of mid-night banking in Kumamoto City. The banking system here has taken some getting used to for my. Here the banks are doing you a favor by looking after your money and you have to fit your visits to them into your schedule. They do not pay interest on regular accounts, but they do have some 6 month CDs that return a whopping 0.2%. Yes, that is less than one percent. Don't even ask about the rate for a one month CD. Banks are open on weekdays, from about 9:30 am until 3:30 pm. Most of the cash machines are located in the bank lobby and remain open until about 6:00 pm. Often, they are open for about eight hours on Saturday as well. The rest of the time, the miracle of 24hour banking has not yet arrived to Japan, except in Tokyo airport and a few other places.
People do not use checks here and credit cards are extremely rare. Cash is used for all store purchases. When the amounts get too high, or when you want to give money to another individual or organization, the direct bank transfer is used. When I want to pay my rent, I race to the bank to get to the ATM before the attendant goes home and the ATM shuts down. I punch in a bunch of numbers, deposit my coins and bills into the machine and send it all to my landlord's account electronically. My friends bought a brand new car using a bank transfer. All of the applications for the races I enter also come with a bank number so that I can transfer the registration fee directly to them at the post office. The bank accounts still use passbooks and the ATM machine accepts them as well. I discovered yesterday that the machine can even turn the pages in the book when one fills up and it wants to start printing on the next page.
On the note of Japanese technology, some things here still confuse me. They have a high level of technology in many areas, but on the evening news, they do not always make use of it. When the newsreader is talking about the operations of a ship, he moves a little plastic ship around his desk to demonstrate. Many things on the news that have been presented by computer graphics for years in the US are shown with cardboard posters and tape and magnets here.
I am still getting to sushi quite often, as well as learning to make my own Japanese rice balls and pancakes (they have squid in them).
Since 1995, I have organized my life so as to avoid winter. To me, there has only been tourist season and rainy season. Cold weather season meant climbing a mountain, hot weather season meant going to the beach. Here, they organize their seasons differently. I do not even have to move to change seasons. One month it summer, later it is fall, and then a few months later it is winter. It is strange for me to witness the change of seasons without traveling. It also means that I can not get warm again by just lowering my elevation. I am already at sea level. This whole winter thing is taking some getting used to, especially since it is the coldest winter in a very long time here. But, on the 21st of December I was happy. Up until that day, every day since the day I arrived in Japan, was shorter than the previous one. Since the end of December, however, every day has been longer than the one before it and I can expect this pattern to continue for many more months still.
For the first time since July of 1995, I do not have sandal tan marks on my feet. I have no tan marks anyplace. Too much bundling up I fear.
Re-contracting decision day was yesterday and I formally requested a second year here on the JET program. So, after the summer that I am looking forward to, it seems that I will have another winter to survive. But, survive I will, and no doubt enjoy as well.
As you might expect, I have been very busy since my last update in November. School life has settled into a comfortable routine. I ride to school and get there at about 8:30 in the morning. I help teach a few classes in the morning and usually have an hour or two free to study Japanese. I eat lunch in a different class room everyday. The students are always excited to see me enter the room at lunch time. Sometimes they talk to me, sometimes they don't. After lunch there is a free period, and I have begun playing Shogi with the students.
Shogi is the Japanese version of chess. It is very similar to chess, so I was able to figure it out quickly. In some ways I like it more than chess. When you capture an opponent's piece, you can put it back on the board for your own side. In one of my school's the students are not allowed to play games, but in the other two, I enjoy a game or two of Shogi before my final class of the day. Then, I head home and go to the gym or Tai Chi or rock climbing or Japanese class.
At school, I have settled into a routine with my teachers. Some only use me to stand up there and read an occasional sentence. Others like me to do a five or ten minute warm up activity before standing up there and reading an occasional sentence. A few make an effort to never use the text book when I am there and plan fun activities for the whole class. A couple of others always ask me what I have planned and let me run the whole 50 minute class.
I no longer visit third grade student classes. They are too busy for fun and games. They will all take the entrance examinations for High School during the next five weeks. The examinations for the private High Schools started yesterday and continue through the 8th of March, when the public school test is given. This is a very big deal to them and they have spent a lot of time studying.
On Thursday, at Kamoike Junior High School, the students were given a large pile of papers describing how to behave and what to do during this weekends testing. For an hour, they were told a million little details over the loud speaker. They were told to get a good night rest, to eat breakfast, to take public transport to the test, wear a clean uniform, make sure no buttons are missing, use the toilet at home before they go, bring their own slippers, not to fight with students from other schools at the test site, cut their finger nails, call the homeroom teacher as soon as they get home and not to eat during breaks. They had so many rules to remember that I will be surprised if there is any room left in their heads for the actual test material.
Last August I started to learn the Hiragana alphabet. Hiragana is the Japanese writing system used for verb endings, prepositions, pronunciation guides, general "Japanese" words and most non-verb and non-noun parts of speech. It took a while to learn all 46 symbols, but I have got it down pretty well now. In October, I started on Katakana. Katakana is sort of like the printing version of the cursive Hiragana style. Each of the 46 Hiragana symbols has very different Katakana version. Katakana is used for foreign loan words, of which there is a surprising number. Many foods, foreign names, and all of the thousands of borrowed words in Japanese are written in Katakana.
An amazing number of things are written in Katakana. Once I was able to read it, I could understand a lot. The only trick is trying to guess the English word buried in the Japanese pronunciation. There is no way to write the "TH", "L" or "V" sounds in any Japanese writing system, so they have to approximate with "SE", "RA" and "BU" instead. This means that "Love" is written as "Rabu" in Japanese. Some words, like "Aisu Curimu"(ice cream) are easy. Others, like "Hochikisu" (Hodgekiss - the word they use for stapler) are a bit more difficult to figure out.
Finally, I have begun to study Kanji, as well. Kanji is the picture writing system that was borrowed from the Chinese. Kanji is used for people and place names, as well as for verb roots and most nouns. Some of the pictures look like what they are supposed to mean. So, it is easy to read mountain, because it looks like a mountain. Most are much more difficult. There are about 80 basic elements that make up the majority of Kanji characters and I am starting to become familiar with them. I would have to learn about 2000 of the well over 10,000 to read a newspaper. I don't expect to ever read a newspaper.
Ever since the first time I learned to read, over 25 years ago, I have enjoyed reading. As I become familiar with more and more characters in the various Japanese alphabets, it takes me longer and longer to walk down the street. I try to read as much of every sign as I can, so a one block walk can take about 15 minutes as I slowly sound out each letter. I can still hear my mother's voice in my head from 25 years ago encouraging me to look at the word and "sound it out".
Sometimes, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I went to my favorite store in town, Outdoors Station, and found an application for a rock climbing class. There was a lot of undecipherable Kanji on the form, but I could read the parts in Katakana that spoke of rock climbing, middle and expert classes, top-roping and other climbing terms. I signed up and went on the appropriate day. Everyone took turns climbing on the 40 foot wall. I had my turn and only got up about half way before falling off and being caught by the rope. When I got down, one of the other contestants told me "Not to worry, every one does poorly in their first competition." Competition? This was the first I had heard of a competition, I thought it was a class. Needless to say, I came in last place. The next day I bought some climbing shoes and a harness and now I go out to the wall a few times per week to practice.
Speaking of competitive events, I ran in my first 10km (6.2 mile) race in January. I went down to Ibuski for the 22st (22st is their spelling -last year was the 21th and I suppose that next year will be the 23nd) Nanohana Marathon and had a good time. I had stopped training six weeks before due to the cold, so I was well rested. The main event of the day was a marathon, in which about 6,000 people participated. I joined the smaller crowd of nearly 3,000 for the 10 km race. I started in the back, so it took nearly two minutes for me just to get to the starting line.
For the first 5km there were so many people packed into the street, that it was difficult to pass anyone. During the second half of the race, it was still crowded, but I could finally speed up a little bit. I was good and tired by the end, but finished in a decent 52 minutes. After the race, I headed straight to the beach to get buried up to my neck in the naturally heated sand. Then I went back to the road to watch the marathoners finish. Even after five hours, there were still hundreds of them passing by. I have a few more races planned in the next few months and I hope to improve my times. I am making the Nanohana Marathon of 2004 my training goal.
I am still spending one day each weekend on a long bike ride. Click here to see my bike, it is in the Products page, the Great Journey 1. I usually go about 60 or 70 miles in a different direction each week.
I had nine days of free time during the New Year's break. I finally got a chance to take my new bike out for a true test. On the 28th of December, I loaded up my tent, stove, food, camping supplies and bike tools and headed northwest. I knew I was off to a good start when I got to about 2,000 feet above sea level and it started to snow. I came down the other side of the mountain and into the rain. I went almost to Nagashima, in the extreme Northwest part of Kagoshima Prefecture. I camped near the ocean and rode on into Amuksa in the Kumamoto Prefecture the next day. After spending a night near some hot springs, I continued on to Kumamoto City. I saw one of the three best preserved (recently reconstructed) ancient castles of Japan. I also ate the regional specialty -raw horse meat sushi. The neck was white and chewy and not my favorite. The chest meat was tasty and red and well marbled with fat, as they like all their mammal meats here.
Kumamoto is a bigger city than Kagoshima and I saw many things there that we do not have here. They had ATM machines open until mid-night and a Starbucks coffee shop. But I don't miss those things here in Kagoshima. I don't often bank late at night and I don't drink coffee. Besides, we do have Haagen Daaz and Baskin Robbins ice cream shops in Kagoshima.
From Kumamoto, I headed east and camped near Gokase, in Miyazaki Prefecture. I camped near the southernmost ski resort in Japan. The operative part of that phrase was ski resort and not southernmost. It was cold. Then I went to Miyazaki City and Aoshima Island on the east coast of this part of Japan. I soaked in a nice hot spring and then continued south. Along the way I saw some monkeys. At Cape Toi I saw wild horses, but I had no soy sauce, so I left them alone. The whole southern coast of Miyazaki Prefecture is lined with interesting rock formations which I could admire from my bike as I rode through the rain.
After a few days of being cold and wet, I decided to head home early. I ended up riding about 400 miles in eight days. I still like hiking better, but I now think that a bike would be a great way to get from hike to hike on some future multi-month vacation.
I was glad I cut my ride a day short. A few hours after I got home, it snowed for the first time in 16 years in Kagoshima City. It snowed all night and all day the next day. The snow stuck around for about three days and many children had their first snowball fights. On Monday, the little elementary school boys were so cute in their super-short shorts and uniform jackets. None of them strolled to school that day. Nope, they all ran through the snow with their little knees knocking, no doubt looking forward to the days when they will be Junior High School students and will be allowed (required) to wear long pants every day. The girls also looked cold in their skirts, but they will not be allowed to wear tights until they get to High School. But, they can wear shorts under their skirts and as many shirts as will fit under their sailor uniforms.
Last Wednesday, it snowed for the second time in 16 years, as well as the second time this month. It was hard to keep the student's attention in class since they all wanted to watch the snow storm outside the big windows. But, it was fun to watch their breath as they talked. I stole a page from their book and started heavy layering. On the cold days, I now wear long under wear under my pants, and three jackets over my heavy work shirt and undershirts. The class rooms are well ventilated and don't really start to heat up until about 30 minutes after class starts. After it ends, the doors are opened up again as people come and go. Then, the cold comes and the heat goes. The teachers return to the teacher's room and stand around the little kerosene heater with the teapot on top and complain about how cold it is.
For the past two weeks, many students and teachers have been absent. In some classes, as many as 10 students were missing, out of 35. Some schools were closed due to lack of attendance. There has been a bad cold going around, which they call influenza, but I think we just call it the flu in English.
Many students, especially girls, carry around cute washcloth sized towels. In the summer they used them to blot sweat off of their heads. Now, I have discovered that they have a winter use as well. They can blot their nose if anything leaks out. As every good Japanese knows, it is rude and disgusting to blow your nose in a tissue. If you do, you are stuck with a dirty piece of garbage in your hand. No, it is much better to sniffle. The music of 30 people in a room sniffling is truly unique to my experience. The towels are just a back-up, in case gravity proves to be stronger than suction. I have this picture in my head of young Japanese children, sitting in front of the TV when they have a cold and blowing their noses. In my vision, their mothers scold them and say "Stop blowing your nose and just sniffle." I imagine that none of them have experienced the horror of being chased and smothered by a tissue and told to blow.
I mentioned the wonders of mid-night banking in Kumamoto City. The banking system here has taken some getting used to for my. Here the banks are doing you a favor by looking after your money and you have to fit your visits to them into your schedule. They do not pay interest on regular accounts, but they do have some 6 month CDs that return a whopping 0.2%. Yes, that is less than one percent. Don't even ask about the rate for a one month CD. Banks are open on weekdays, from about 9:30 am until 3:30 pm. Most of the cash machines are located in the bank lobby and remain open until about 6:00 pm. Often, they are open for about eight hours on Saturday as well. The rest of the time, the miracle of 24hour banking has not yet arrived to Japan, except in Tokyo airport and a few other places.
People do not use checks here and credit cards are extremely rare. Cash is used for all store purchases. When the amounts get too high, or when you want to give money to another individual or organization, the direct bank transfer is used. When I want to pay my rent, I race to the bank to get to the ATM before the attendant goes home and the ATM shuts down. I punch in a bunch of numbers, deposit my coins and bills into the machine and send it all to my landlord's account electronically. My friends bought a brand new car using a bank transfer. All of the applications for the races I enter also come with a bank number so that I can transfer the registration fee directly to them at the post office. The bank accounts still use passbooks and the ATM machine accepts them as well. I discovered yesterday that the machine can even turn the pages in the book when one fills up and it wants to start printing on the next page.
On the note of Japanese technology, some things here still confuse me. They have a high level of technology in many areas, but on the evening news, they do not always make use of it. When the newsreader is talking about the operations of a ship, he moves a little plastic ship around his desk to demonstrate. Many things on the news that have been presented by computer graphics for years in the US are shown with cardboard posters and tape and magnets here.
I am still getting to sushi quite often, as well as learning to make my own Japanese rice balls and pancakes (they have squid in them).
Since 1995, I have organized my life so as to avoid winter. To me, there has only been tourist season and rainy season. Cold weather season meant climbing a mountain, hot weather season meant going to the beach. Here, they organize their seasons differently. I do not even have to move to change seasons. One month it summer, later it is fall, and then a few months later it is winter. It is strange for me to witness the change of seasons without traveling. It also means that I can not get warm again by just lowering my elevation. I am already at sea level. This whole winter thing is taking some getting used to, especially since it is the coldest winter in a very long time here. But, on the 21st of December I was happy. Up until that day, every day since the day I arrived in Japan, was shorter than the previous one. Since the end of December, however, every day has been longer than the one before it and I can expect this pattern to continue for many more months still.
For the first time since July of 1995, I do not have sandal tan marks on my feet. I have no tan marks anyplace. Too much bundling up I fear.
Re-contracting decision day was yesterday and I formally requested a second year here on the JET program. So, after the summer that I am looking forward to, it seems that I will have another winter to survive. But, survive I will, and no doubt enjoy as well.
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