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.