Can you guess what you’re eating yet?

“Be careful what you teach people, for they will use it against you.” I’ve put that in quotation marks, because I’m sure that someone important (even more important than me, perhaps) has said it. It is, however, never more true than for the English teacher in a foreign country. In an attempt to have an interesting, non-textbook, culture-type class, I taught my 3rd graders a few casual English phrases. Rather than the usual “hello, how are you?” I taught them “alright mate?” What was I thinking? This has caught on big style. Every walk down the corridor makes me feel like I am walking through the Peckham High Street branch of the Cockney Appreciation Society, greeted as I am with a barrage of Alright mate? Alright mate? Alright mate? Alright mate? Alright mate? Alright mate? Alright mate? Alright mate? I’m not sure if this was the “culture” that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had in mind when the JET Programme was established… It got them talking at least – every cloud.
I have become a bit more aware of some of the peculiarities of Japanese life of late, having gone through a spell of taking everything for granted. On first viewing, a lot of things in Japan elicit the “huh?” reaction, but this fades after a week or two and you stop questioning things (or perhaps you forget that things are different anywhere else).
Take the humble loo for example. In Japan you can be presented with a space-aged toilet with numerous buttons, options and displays befitting a NASA shuttle one minute and then a squat toilet the next. With such a range of possibilities, every bowl movement is an adventure; you just don’t know what the next public convenience will bring. It might be something crazy, something you’ve never seen before. If I find myself on a heated seat (and as a general rule, if you can sit on it will heat up), I always like to whack the temp up to max, just to see if I can take it. I’m unbeaten thus far. This could be my thing, my special superhero power – I have an arse made of asbestos! I think the standard superman costume would be fine, but maybe with the cheeks cut out to highlight where my power lies, or a different colour at the very least.
In the same way that Japan has embraced the heated loo seat, perhaps India could corner the market on the chilled loo seat, for those post vindaloo mornings. On a side note, does the name vindaloo come from combining the word “vindictive” with the word “loo?” Your thoughts on a postcard please.
Food is another one. My taste buds have completely changed in Japan. At home, everything I ate had to have some kind of spicy kick to it, be it a hamburger, a curry, or even a packet of crisps. Here such intense flavours are harder to come by. Japanese food seems to be centred on texture above flavour – take the wasabe out of sushi and you have something that’s pretty bland really.
A tip for anyone planning a trip to Japan is to eat first and ask questions later. Chances are, if other people are eating it then it probably won’t do you any harm either (fugu (puffer fish) and raw chicken being notable exceptions), and if you knew what it was you probably wouldn’t want to eat it (whale and sea urchin being prime examples). I’m having one of those weeks where every second meal has something dodgy and / or unidentifiable in it. I have eaten grilled chicken skin (yes, just the skin, on a stick, grilled), marinated scallop shell (yes, just the shell), squid (twice – legs and body / head (depending on how you look at it…) and some sort of fish. Don’t get me wrong though, I enjoy the food here and I eat well and healthily, but what I am eating now is what I would have turned my nose up at last year. I’ve stopped asking about veggies – in a country where bamboo and lotus flower root are staples, what hope do I have of remembering the unusual stuff on my plate?
Well, it’s home time for me and I’m on holiday as of tomorrow for about 10 days, but I’m sure I will have more to report when I return.
Until then.

Out with old. In with the new.

It’s official; my Elementary Schools are the unofficial sponsors of my blog. I only seem to blog (it’s ok as a verb, right?) when I’m at ES. Typically I have three classes during an ES visit. They tend to be in the morning when the students (and teachers) are at their most attentive. This leaves me with the afternoon free, so I dutifully study Japanese until I fall asleep (about 45 minutes usually does the trick). I spend the rest of the day making coffee and tapping away on my konpyu-ta. Anyway, this is a long way of saying: I’ve not written in my blog because I’ve not been at Elementary School. So, with excuses out of the way, let’s begin.
The ES break was due to the wrapping up of the school year at the end of March. Schools, Universities, the fiscal year and winter all end at the same time in Japan, this is the land of uniformity after all, or so they say. This neatly ties in with the haru-yasumi (spring break). School holidays are only holidays in name in Japan. Everyone still comes to school, the students take part in their club activities and the staff shuffle paper and try and look busy. The English teachers from around Joetsu got together for a few viciously productive meetings during the spring break.
The employment practices of the Japanese education system and the UK education system are somewhat different. In Japan, rather than being employed by a specific school, you are employed by a Board of Education, which oversees a number of schools. This means that where you work is in the hands of the BOE, not you. If you are a new teacher, you might want to work in one of your local schools. Sorry, because you are a newbie you’ll have to work two hours up the road (in band 3). Once you have done three years there (and three years is the max you can do before being moved on), then we’ll shift you to a new school a little closer to where you ideally want to work (band 2). Another three years later and we might put you in a local, band 1 school. More experienced teachers get to stay at a school for up to seven years before being moved on. Who gets shifted where is entirely in the hands of the BOE and the school principal announces the details of the moves during a rather intense morning staff meeting.
The way I see it (if you ever see this combination of words in my blog, it’s usually a hint that you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph as there may be little value in it for you…) by having the ability to move people around as they wish, Japan avoids having those truly awful problem schools that exist in some places. By placing the right teachers in the right school at the right time, I believe that you can completely reverse the fortunes for a school. Admittedly, successful schools will lose good teachers, but the hope is to maintain a level playing field across the board. I’m sure there are many other pros and cons and reasons for their methods, and the google-web is there for those of you who are interested.
At any rate, out of a staff of 26, seven left Itakura Junior High School, including the Principal, Vice Principal and the head of English – all of my bosses basically. The end of the Junior High School year culminated with a ceremony. Without meaning to generalise, there’s nothing the Japanese like more than a ceremony at which they can be all solemn and intense. Great pleasure is taken in doing things in a regimented way, with lots of bowing and sporadic bursts of manic applause. There was a special separate staff leaving ceremony, where the entire 3rd grade came back to see off their old teachers. It was a very sad affair (sad – upsetting, not sad – pathetic). The departing teachers said a few words and cried; the students said a few words and cried. I remained stoic. The teacher-student relationship in Japan is much closer that in the UK. It is viewed as the responsibility of the school to bring up a child, not the parent. Flowers, sad music and a tunnel of clapping students only heightened the tear-jerking quotient. A staff party followed with lots of drinking, raw fish (as well as jelly fish and deep-fried chicken cartilage (not together, but separate is bad enough I think)), and the full version of the school song sung in an uncomfortably tight arm-in-arm circle – I felt like John Redwood trying to bluff his way through the Welsh national anthem.
Anyway, those days are past now and autumn leaves lie thick and still, as they say. New teachers have arrived and desks have been re-arranged. I feel like a veteran at Itakura now. All things considered, I have been there for longer than one in four members of staff! Best of all though, the 2nd grade from last year, 3rd grade this year, have surprised me enormously and seem to have finally grown-up, which should make for a fun year. Moreover (check out my vocab), I know a lot of the first grade students from the two Elementary Schools that I work at, so I know them better than any of the other teachers, so they aren’t scared of me, which is important in the teacher-pupil relationship if you ask me! Still, the new kids remain terribly nervous and it’s very amusing to see the cocky ones from 6th grade ES who are now bumbling around without a clue. In their defence, a shiny-new school uniform that’s three sizes too big for you does little to make you look or feel cool.