Some random observations

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.