Little Computer Access Between Classes

10/02
I never know what to do when teachers are sleeping at their desks. On Friday I spun around in my chair to ask Batman a question, only to be met with him slumped over in his chair, head nodding. Awkwardly, I crept back to my desk. What to do, what to do? Am I supposed to wake him? It is the middle of the day. I don’t know, people in the U.S. catch a lot of flack from the Japanese workforce for only working 9-5 and for getting breaks and long lunches, but in the States you’d have your ass handed to you for texting, sleeping at your desk, or spending 2 hours every day in the break room watching television. I think it’s just a matter of where we like to spend our time. People in the U.S. would rather bust their asses in order to be free to spend their time at home as they like, where apparently Japanese people would rather chill all day, even if it means no free time. Also they apparently don’t mind being watched by their co-workers for 12 hours a day, me on the other hand, I go crazy never getting any privacy at work. I always spill my food because I’m too worried about people watching me eat with chopsticks and carry my soup across the room.

In the vein of judgment, halfway through the week of my teaching classes, hypocrisy began to run rampant. Ichi-sensei went on a superiority rant about how he only uses English in the classroom. Not only is this not the case, but I’ve walked past his class before and he usually teaches entirely in Japanese. In fact, sometimes I can only tell what class it is based on the sound of his voice because not a word of English is spoken. I don’t begrudge him that so much, I just wish he hadn’t been so condescending when calling me out when I mentioned how much Japanese is spoken in English class.

And I have to say, there was more than one instance this week where a teacher gave me criticism on my lesson plan, I pondered it for a while, and came to the unspoken response of, “Hm. Maybe it’s you.” Seriously, much of this system is contradictory. I’m in a place where people demand things of me but at the same time prevent me from doing them. I comprised my lesson entirely of communicative conversation exercises and if the students had been barred from using Japanese they would have been talking to a partner or a group for the entire period. When (for some UNKNOWN REASON) the students didn’t use English, a teacher told me they weren’t getting enough speaking practice, so he wanted me to have them repeat THE INSTRUCTIONS to the exercises out loud after I read them. In what fantasy land is that oral skills? The irony is that this practice took time away from their dialog practice.

Of course, my lessons are far from perfect. I’m still learning the Japanese classroom, and that’s hard for me. I look at the students’ faces and they are the same whether they understand or not. I haven’t yet figured out how to gauge the silence. I don’t know which words they know and which they don’t. It’s a wonder ALTs without teaching background or language awareness can teach at all. Again, I’m wanting to be perfect and I’m in a situation where I just can’t be. I think I’m going to view life quite differently when I get back to the States.

After our last class together for the week, I had another conversation with Ichi-sensei. This time he breathed a sigh of relief and told me he was glad the week was over. When we were talking about how students don’t always respond as we’d like, he admitted that most of the language used in the Japanese English classroom is Japanese. He also pointed out that as much as he tries to teach in English, it’s very hard to do when you’re the only one. It’s true. The kids don’t know how to respond and how to listen in English when they’re allowed to use Japanese. I reassured him that I don’t hate the players, I hate the game, so to speak. Japan is coming around, but I think it will be a good decade at least before its classrooms catch up to other foreign language classrooms.

Then Ichi-sensei went on to tell me about how his wife and him live separately and she was just in a car accident but is okay. For a few minutes I was like, “whoa, whoa, whoa, this is over-share in the States, let alone in Japan where you can go out to eat every other night with your friends and they’ve still never even met your wife.” He continued though and I learned that she lives in Sapporo because she is undergoing fertility treatments because they’ve been trying to have children for six years to no avail. I told him I’ve known a lot of people in the same situation and I’m rooting for him. I think we grew closer from that. Though he did end the conversation with, “She’s finishing one of her rounds of treatment this week, so I may have to go to Sapporo on a moment’s notice!” Which brought us straight back to I-don’t-need-to-know-when-you-have-sex-with-your-wife territory.

A Fun, Fun, Weekend, Indeed

10/5-ish
This weekend was pretty crazy, which is good because my computer has officially bit the dust and keeping busy is the best call. The school days are long and boring, but at least at home I can catch up on all the cooking and cleaning I’ve wanted to do and I have a few friend networks to tap into when I need company.

Saturday I had plans to hang out with Mochi and The Actress and some folks from our English conversation group. I had another bang-up day, as is usually the case with them. They took me to the place where they make our city’s famous figurines and I got to use a soldering iron to make my own. It’s been a long time since I’ve used a soldering iron! I forgot how powerful you feel fusing metals together. After stewing for a long time and finally deciding to do either a sailor moon pose figurine or a figurine doing one of my signature dance moves, I was informed that we had to pick between 3 pre-determined types. Still, I was lucky enough that the “genki” figurine looks like the dance move I was going for! When we left the workshop we walked up to the local radio station to say hello and before I knew it they were insisting we go on the air. Yeah, folks, I was on the radio speaking in both English and Japanese. While my pronunciation is probably better than your typical U.S. person at my level of Japanese, hearing myself during the playback made my skin crawl. But then again, my English voice does much the same thing.

If it wasn’t the case before that more people know me than I can recognize, it’s definitely the case now.

After all the excitement, we went to an okonomiyaki restaurant where the grill is at the center of the table and you make your own. Everything we ate was only half cooked and eaten communally with little spoons straight off the grill. We had okonomiyaki (a dough-y vegetable, seafood, meat dish), soba meshi, and monja in both dessert and savory styles. When my computer comes back, I’ll post the monja dessert video. I think they were trying to tell me that monja is Tokyo style okonomiyaki and it was absolutely my favorite. The dessert style one was a bowl with cream, sprinkles, fruit, and goo that slowly thickens as you cook it, then you wrap it in a crepe and slice it to make little dumplings. We had strawberry, banana, and sweet potato. Soooo good!

Afterward I went straight to the station to go hang out with the foreigners in the city by the sea. It was a little different from the usual izakaya drinking thing, since it was Kei and Sue and me going over to the couple who lives in the middle of nowhere’s house. We watched Billy Elliot (great movie!) and stayed up late talking and watching funny clips on youtube. Their apartment is nicer than mind, though mostly the same because it’s old teacher housing, but it’s also way more inconvenient and $20 more expensive (which, as you know, is almost 1/3 of my rent). I brought some mochi, pizza chips (literally they had chunks of cheese on them, it was strange), panda cookies with chocolate faces, and Calorie-Mate cookies (think power bars that taste like cheese....yeah). I love impromptu foreigner parties because it always means trying new randomass snacks from the conbini. They also served us chocolate chip cookies and popcorn, since they’d just been to Costco.

A fun, fun, weekend indeed!

The Dachshunds Here Have Even Shorter Legs With Even Longer Bodies

On the walk to work, I found myself waiting at a stoplight. There were no cars in sight, just a woman and her dachshund waiting across the narrow street for the same reason. You just don’t cross on a red light in Japan.

The woman looked politely off into the distance like any proper Japanese person trying not to stare at a foreigner, but her dog had no such manners. Only six inches off the ground, the little brown eyes bore a hole into my soul.

He looked placid enough, a quite sort of eagerness – maybe something along the lines of, “I want to sniff you. I wonder if you’ll pet me. What exactly is that thing you’re holding?” At least that’s what I thought he was thinking、though I can never be sure. I find it hard to believe that he would recognize my otherness like I’m sure his owner did, but still his face looked like he did.

I began to wonder if his thoughts were identical to those of a dog in the States. The language difference is probably not so much between Japanese and U.S. dogs, but maybe their thoughts are influenced by how they’re treated culturally. My thoughts and the woman’s thoughts are probably very similar. We both have places to be, things to do, and feelings to feel, but our cultures determine our judgments about those places, things, and feelings.

I’ll probably never know what the dog was thinking, but I hope by the time I’m done here I can understand the woman a little better.

Life Tidbits

I regret to inform that the recycle shop, “2nd Street” is better than “Hard Off.” It’s cheaper, larger, and higher quality. Too bad!

I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately and have been largely successful with my meals, but I tried making banana cake in my rice cooker and failed miserably. I have a theory that people in Japan don’t usually make their own desserts. They don’t eat them much, western desserts are popular but they require an oven, and there are dessert shops everywhere. This means supplies, even simple things like shortening and chocolate chips, comes in very small portions and they’re very expensive and somewhat hard to find. Even flour isn’t easy, though there are hotcake mixes and tempura mixes which very well might be the same thing but I don’t want to risk it. I want with the bag that said “flour” in katakana. This made my grocery bill even more embarrassing because I bought enough to make several cakes for this weekend. I like to buy a lot while grocery shopping, considering that I hate grocery shopping and like my food to last two weeks. This is difficult in Japan because I’m not so keen on prepackaged foods that last. Also, kitchen storage is small and even the carts in the Co-op are nothing more than hand baskets you can put on wheels. I always overflow it lol God pity the check-out lady.

I always worry the other patrons will judge me, like as a foreigner I eat so much more than they do, but I feel better realizing that they don’t know I live by myself. For all they know I feed a family every week.

Now that I’m not sick, I’ve started running again. It feels good!

I was sitting at work on Monday when I felt my first earthquake. It was weird, like sitting in a big truck as it starts up, but then you realize you’re in a building and your brain tells you this kind of movement isn’t possible. It was very small, but a long one. Enough to make me say, “huh, that was a quake.” But not to really be scared.

In other news, I think I hit paydirt. Going through old things in The Pred’s mess she left here in the women’s locker room I found a plastic sword that I will use for my Halloween costume. FTW!

In OMGFail news, I was walking nervously with a full mug of soup across the teacher’s room back to my desk when I started to spill. Being horribly embarrassed I tried to catch it in my hand and ended up burning myself hardcore. T3H suck, insult to injury. In other burn news, apparently when I dried this shirt by the heater I burned the sleeve. It was a cheap thrift store shirt, but it fit well, I liked the material, and it went with everything. Now I have to wear a sweater over it because the sleeve looks golden delicious.