Just in case you thought you ate a lot of rice, here’s a picture of the bag of rice we have in our apartment. It’s a 30 kg bag (66 lb).
Yuko’s parents buy a new one of these about every three months and split it with us. That means that Yuko and I eat about 11 kg (24 lb) of rice each month, and I eat far more of it than Yuko does (too many carbs…).
Good thing we both like genmai (unpolished brown rice).
Even Parmesan cheese needs a mascot and a cell phone strap in Japan.
When I tell people that I’m officiating weddings on the weekend, a question I’ve been asked a number of times is “Why do Japanese people like ‘Western-style’ weddings?”
The biggest reason is “Because it’s cool,” but if you’re interested in reading more about it, I just happened onto the seiyaku.com web site, which does a fabulous job explaining it:
http://www.seiyaku.com/seiyaku/en/western-wedding.html
Their description is pretty accurate for the ceremonies I perform, too- which makes sense, because Japanese people like to do things the same way everyone else does.
Today was an interesting day. I’m teaching summer camp right now, and today was the first outing for one of the office ladies to go out with a class on a field trip. She was incredibly nervous- so much so, in fact, that she worked herself up into a literal fever this morning before we left.
We went to Ehime University’s annual insect exhibition, and it went really well, even though the end of the field trip found me running to get to the bus so we could get back to school on time. The museum had a “Quiz Rally” that the kids found exciting, involving a quiz station set up in each exhibit room where the kids had to write their answers on an answer sheet to win a prize at the end. The prizes ended up being postcards from the gift shop, but they were colorful closeup photos of exotic insects, at least.
The problem was they didn’t have any signage about where to take the answer sheets when you were done, and we were already short on time, so I sent the kids (only five) ahead to the bus with my de facto assistant while I ran around the museum trying to figure out where to get the kids’ “prizes.”
All’s well that ends well, I suppose.
So I’m technically in the country illegally right now. My “Specialist in Humanities / International Services” visa expired last month, and I just realized it about a week ago when I was going through my records for an unrelated reason.
I asked Yuko to call the regional immigration office that covers the region of Japan in which we live to ask what to do. You know those conversations that start with “I have this friend…”? Yeah, it was like that, in which she said she didn’t recall my name or really where I was from, but that I lived in Ehime.
Even though that was all she said, they knew exactly who I was when I went into the local office at 10am the next morning, Friday the 16th. The first woman I talked with was very reasonable. She said there was just one extra form to fill out, a letter of explanation/apology to submit with my visa renewal application.
Unfortunately, she was busy when I went back up to the counter to submit the form, and I talked with a guy who was markedly less friendly. He said they needed time to process the application; their office was about to close for lunch, and I had to go to work anyway, but when I suggested I come back on Tuesday (Monday was a national holiday), the dude suddenly became very animated, telling me that this was very very serious, and the police were going to come arrest me with his pantomimed handcuffs.
I obediently called work and told them I’d be a bit late for my scheduled administrative time.
A school such as mine is accustomed to helping its employees renew their visas, and when I brought in the paperwork from the immigration office, our accountant banged it out in about ten minutes, a model of efficiency. I ran home and grabbed a couple of forms she said I also needed (tax receipts from last year), and went back to the immigration office as they were reopening after lunch.
You have to realize that talking to someone in the Matsuyama immigration office is not as simple as walking up to Lucy’s psychiatric booth, coughing up a nickel, and getting what you need. Each time you hand them something, they dismiss you to the waiting area and secrete it back to their desks to perform arcane rituals that tell them how to proceed. Rinse and repeat until they run out of remotely-related things to tell you they need.
To wit: before my application for visa renewal was actually accepted, they “needed” a two-page application form I filled out, a slightly different two-page application form my school filled out, my letter of explanation, my passport, my foreign national registration card, my municipal health insurance card, receipts for paying income tax last year, receipts from paying my resident taxes last year, and two SEPARATE official certificates from city hall certifying that I had actually paid those two items for the last year (which they wouldn’t issue until I could prove I was current on this year’s payments as well).
Suspicious, I asked my accountant at school if all this was because I let my visa lapse. She said she’d been curious herself, and when she asked the immigration office, they said they had recently changed their renewal requirements, and this was all normal, save the letter of explanation.
Since they’ve finally accepted my application, now I just have to avoid the police while I wait for my new visa.
I’m not sure if Japan wrote the book on yak shaving, but they’re certainly raising it to an art form.
My school had its annual “Summer Festival” on Sunday.
We had a variety of games and booths set up in the classrooms, including a fishing game, a dice game, shaved ice, and my paper airplane booth.
It was pretty neat seeing the kids dressed up in all their summer livery- all these little yukata and jinbei running around made me want my own, so Yuko and I went to Jusco and bought a jinbei for me yesterday. =)
At MSP, a lot of what we do is teach kids activity-focused language to enable them to talk about their lives and the things they do in English, but we’re still essentially a school for learning English.
Japanese kindergartens (yochien) are very different than American kindergartens. For one (as far as I can tell), they’re separate institutions of learning, not attached to elementary schools. Also, the large classes don’t seem to be tightly organized. The kids are much freer to do as they please as opposed to older Japanese schoolchildren.
The theory is that the kids have to be free to find their role in the group, then push themselves to fit into it, rather than having an authoritarian teacher or school administrator (or parent) push you into following the rules. As a teacher, I’ll certainly grant that allowing kids to self-correct is often more effective than correcting them yourself whenever they make a mistake.
Anyway, in order to give our students the best of both worlds (the yochien-style “Lord of the Flies” experience as well as the small class size and personal attention we offer at MSP), we take some of our students on field trips to a local kindergarten about once a month.
My first time there was absolutely terrifying. I didn’t really know anything about Japanese kindergartens, and I was expecting row upon row of cute little smiling faces greeting the group of visiting kids, which I would enthrall with my English-teaching skillz. That was the plan, anyway.
We always show up at recess, when the entire student body is free to do whatever they please. They literally have free rein inside the school’s fence, with some kids running around inside the various classrooms gluing milk cartons and cardboard together, but most of the kids outside, doing educational things like using real knives to cut up real vegetables and put in real frying pans on real gas burners (no gas, of course, that wouldn’t be safe). Or jumping on top of a two meter tall jungle gym. Or practicing their unicycle skills (I kid you not).
Immediately after we arrive, we put our stuff down in the classroom where we’ll be teaching, and head back outside to make some friends.
Playing with the kids is actually pretty cool. Once you realize that nothing either of you says is intelligible to the other, communication becomes all gesticulation and body language. But really, you’re not engaging in intellectual discourse, you’re a walking novelty on a kindergarten playground, so it’s fine.
After recess is over, it’s showtime. This is when the MSP teachers give a thirty-minute lesson to the kindergarten kids. As I think back, I believe there are about 30-35 kids in a classroom, and I always disperse the MSP kids throughout the room. They make good plants, so there are always at least a few voices answering your questions. 😉
We’ve done lessons for Halloween, Christmas (there’s a whole other topic), animals, and most recently, things in the room. My lessons usually involve the kids smiling and shouting at the top of their lungs, then (sort of) singing a song involving the vocab they just heard, and maybe a little pointing or item identification game or something. Good times.
What prompted me to write this already-too-long-for-itself entry is the field trip we took last week. It was the first time I felt really comfortable wading into the sea of black-haired ankle-biters. I knew the drill, I knew where we needed to go and when, I seemed like I finally looked like a figure of authority for these kids I’d never seen before.
After recess, we had our lesson, and the kids all responded fantastically. They paid attention, they repeated, they pointed, and they shouted on cue. After the lesson, four separate kids came up to me to ask me to sit at their lunch table.
After eating, I sat down on the tatami mat by the bookcase and talked to the small-but-growing group of kids about what I saw in their Japanese books. They pointed at stuff and said things in Japanese. I picked up what I could, but their Japanese was still better than mine, so I mostly ended up smiling, nodding, and saying the thing in English (which is what they wanted most of the time, anyway).
I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of this. 🙂
The school year in Japan runs on three semesters, roughly April-July, August-December, and January-March. Kids get a vacation in between each semester: as little as two weeks, up to a month for some schools in summer.
Between the last semester of the year and new year starting in April, my school runs a two-week day camp for kids who want to keep their English skills polished (read: moms who don’t want their kids underfoot while they’re on vacation).
The kids seem to really enjoy it, as it’s a low-pressure environment, but the planning is pretty stressful for the teachers, because it’s basically a one-off for planning purposes. This frees your hand when planning, but it doesn’t give you any real direction, and lesson planning without any goals or direction is not easy.
We have three camps at our school, and together with Joe (a new teacher as of a few months ago) I’ve been in charge of the oldest group of kids. It’s actually two one-week sessions back to back, with a few of the same kids enrolled in both weeks, so we couldn’t run the same plan twice. We decided to go with flowering plants for week one and birds for week two.
The picture is lunchtime with the kids and assistant in the classroom. In the background, you can see some of their artwork on the wall, and you can sort of see the tree in the corner on which we’re been hanging various birds made out of origami.
Between the camp and planning classes for next semester, I’m swamped.
Japanese burrito
You can’t really get Mexican food here, but these things are available in most grocery stores.
It’s basically a big fat sushi roll with sandwich-like innards (lettuce, chicken, egg, and some fixin’s in this case) that you eat like a burrito.
Pizza in Japan is served with Tabasco sauce (or packets of “hot green sauce,” like this one from Pizza Hut). This is unfortunate, as the crust of Japanese pizza is typically already saturated with oil. Also, crushed red pepper (my pizza condiment of choice) is unavailable here.
“Mottainai” in this context basically means “don’t be wasteful,” and there are directions on the outside of the cardboard box so you can fold it down to a manageable size to put out with your paper recycling.
Oh, and pizza is phenomenally expensive here. Medium pizzas start at about $12, and a large will set you back about $30.