Pitagora suicchi

Well, I'm taking this blog places it's never been before - posting video youtube video pod links. I don't know what I'm doing to be honest, but let's see what happens. Let's youtube link!
Right, this wee video is part of a kids TV show here that I catch now and again. It may have been the inspiration for the old Honda advert. I find these immensely satisfying. Enjoy.

The tears of a clown

Today is another elementary school day for me. I used to compare working at elementary school to being a rock star, but I’m more like a clown – a rock star clown! I’m not trying to be big headed, but the 1st – 4th graders love me. The 5th and 6th graders pretend they don’t, but they really do. I’ve found that the young kids will remember English better if the class itself was memorable (I’m sure there are some redundant words in there, but I’ll leave them in at no extra cost to you the reader). As the kids can’t understand most of what I say, I can’t fascinate them with anecdotes or have them rolling in the aisles with witticisms and word play. No, I have to become a clown for 45 minutes. This involves thinking at their level. What would I find funny if I was a 7 year old? Would it be funny if sensei walked into the blackboard? Yeah! Would it be funny if sensei kept trying to stick stuff to the board, but it kept falling off? Yeah! Would it be funny if sensei pulled funny faces and pretended to fall over a lot? Yeah! I never actually pretend to fall over, but with 30 kids sat spread out on the floor, I inevitably find one to trip over. If the kids are laughing and having fun, the more they will play the games you’ve prepared, and the more they play the games, the more they learn.
The way I learn is very different to how they learn. I sit down and slowly struggle my way through a rather dry Japanese textbook. I see the word for “rabbit” and I try to remember it and maybe even use it in a sentence. The kids bounce around the room with their hands flapping next to their ears shouting: “I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!” I know who’s having more fun.

Ps. you know you’ve worked your first graders hard during lunchtime football when half the players come back bleeding. I’m glad to say that none of them cried – they just bounced back up as though nothing had happened. Had they been with a female teacher, maybe they would have gone for the sympathy vote. That’s a borderline controversial statement, but I’m going to leave it in there to spice things up! There are no holds barred in this blog! Nothing’s taboo!

Pps. see how I linked the clown thing and the crying thing? Check the title again. How’s that for a slice of deep-fried gold? I should charge people to read this.

Consciousness: that annoying time between naps

In Japan, I am a girl magnet. Literally. But only on trains and buses. And only when the girl next to me has fallen asleep. The Japanese have a great knack of falling into a deep, comatose sleep whilst in public. When Cloudy came over in the summer I took the night bus to Tokyo. I had an hour or so to kill from about 5am in Ikebukuro, one of Tokyo’s many cities-within-a-city. The capsule hotel is pretty much designed for the salary man who has had a few too many after a late night at work and has missed the last train home. Stroll up to the hotel and check in to your coffin-esque “room”. These, it would seem, are the lucky ones. There are those who don’t make it as far as the capsule hotel and simply collapse and fall asleep as is on the pavement near the train station, hoping that they can get the first train home and that the Mrs will be none the wiser. It’s very odd to all these suited and booted homeless (albeit only for tonight). The August nighttime temp in Tokyo will be between 25 and 30C, so there’s no risk of hypothermia. Also, as Japan is such a safe country (although, how safe is any country whose neighbour is North Korea), you’re unlikely to have anything nicked. Anyway, back to the story.
On the way back from Nagoya this weekend I took the local yokel train to Arai from Nagano. Being a small, tinny, countryside train, it didn’t have pairs of seats in rows. Instead, it had seats along the windows facing the centre aisle, like a tube train. The girl sat next to me had clearly enjoyed the national holiday by doing a stack of shopping in the big smoke. Now, she could have dozed in any number of ways. She could have fallen directly forward, but this hardly ever happens. She could have flipped backwards out of the window, but this is rarer still. This leaves a 50-50 toss up between left and right. 99 times out of 100 the girl will roll straight into me.
You can see it coming quite far in advance. It usually starts with a distinctive slouching and relaxing of the shoulders. Next comes the “concurring drunk” as I like to call it – the continuous and exaggerated nodding of the head. Once the head has settled and is slumped forward, chin on chest, then it’s just a matter of time.
The initial tentative swaying starts. I try not to look. I’m not going to wake her up, because I hate that. I also don’t want to tell her friend: “Can you please wake your mate up, before she rolls right into me?” The other girl is doing her best to subtly wake her heavy-eyed friend. She clearly thought that coming inches away from rolling into a stranger, and a foreigner at that, was something akin to poking a lion in the nose with a wooden chair. Defending her friend’s right to dose off in public, the girl made a few gentle attempts to rouse her. Unfortunately, her friend was beyond help. The course was plotted. ETA established.
Thud. What’s the etiquette? Just let her have her forty winks there on your shoulder? Cough or twitch and hope that that is enough to wake her? Hold out for the next big bump to startle them conscious? (note: this is not possible on a Shinkansen). I chose to let her sleep it off, whilst pretending that I hadn’t noticed what had happened. I must have seemed truly engrossed in my book, but I had long stopped reading and was merely staring at the page, willing the girl to join us in the land of the living.
Luckily we weren’t far from Nihongi Station, the one point on the journey when the train does a bit of a three-point turn, reversing back up the line to where it can change tracks. This change in g-force (all of 1.2G), was enough to joggle her back to life. Realizing what she had been doing and thoroughly embarrassed, she was now über awake, seemingly taking in every detail of her new found surroundings. I started to read again.

"If you go down to the woods today..."

The morning meeting is an important part of the Japanese working day. It doesn’t matter if you’re a government worker or pumping gas, you will have your morning choukai. It’s a way of making sure that everyone is starting the day on the same foot. It’s probably the most formal part of my day. We stand at our desks, turn to face the principal, vice-principal and the head teacher who sit at the head of the staff room and then bow deeply whilst bellowing out ohayou-gozaimasu (good morning). We then sit down and pretend to listen intently to each announcement.
I’m sure that the other teachers are actually listening. I have developed a Japanese filter, so my mind is able to wander to more pressing issues for the duration of the meeting. Did I put the milk back in the fridge? What’s for lunch? Are Rangers rubbish because I’m not in Scotland and will they get good again if I go back? I pick up 5–8% of what is being said, and only about 0.7% of that is of any relevance to me. My ears do prick up from time to time, however.
Today I heard the word kuma being repeated several times. Kuma means bear. I looked up and the vice-principal was holding a sheet of paper with an annotated diagram of a rather sinister looking bear (they always get a bad press). I felt that this was a topic worthy of further investigation. I asked Akatsuka-sensei what the deal was. Apparently bear sightings in nearby Myoko have spiked (spuk?) of late. There have been 19 bear sightings in the last month. Bears are unlikely to attack an adult, but they aren’t averse to taking a pop at an elementary school student if they are hungry (the bear, not the student).
The wife of the former principal of my school who retired this year (the principal, not his wife) was mauled whilst walking in the forest near her house. As a deterrent, students are advised to wear a bell on their school bags. The hope is that the ringing will reduce the chances of students happening upon a bear, startling it and thus provoking an attack (by the bear, not the student). My concern (as a freelance psychologist) is that the bears will start to associate the sound of the bells with an easy, bite sized snack.
Speaking of fast food (fast to eat that is, the students themselves are not especially fast), McDonald’s use the same slogan here as they use in other countries: “do, do, do, do, doo – I’m loving it!” However, because Japanese people can’t pronounce the letter’s l and v the slogan becomes: “do, do, do, do, doo – I’m rubbing it!” Quite what you’ll find at a Maccy-D’s in Japan, and how fast the service will be, I don’t know…

Yeah, it's English, but...not

Computers are seen as the blight and the blessing of the modern world. However, it’s not the computers that are inherently evil, it’s what you do with them. I have found that the most evil thing that you can do with a computer is use it to translate an elementary school lesson plan from Japanese into English. Here is an excerpt from today’s lesson plan.

1 – A teacher teaches the right, the left, the front, the back, a word of sit down, stand up, jumping to children while gesturing you.
2 – Sit down on the one step jumping place to the back where one step jumps before where one step jumps to the one step jumping left to the right; stand up.
3 – Close: Mr Colin gives instructions three times last. The last is said to “put up the right hand” and does goodbye in spite of being a swing.

Personally, I love the ballsy use of the semi-colon in #2, following what can only be described as a certificate 18 butchering of the English language. So, we can put a man on the moon, and we can bounce information around the globe at the touch of a button, but we can’t design a program capable of translating Japanese to English (or vice versa). It makes me feel better about my linguistic failings when a computer capable of a billion calculations a second can’t differentiate between a verb and a noun.
I poke fun at this translation, but it’s tongue in cheek – no one, man nor machine, is perfect. Just today I straight-facedly told a six year old that: “I read a lot of water.” I obviously meant to say: “I drink a lot of water”, but this is an easy mistake to make in Japanese (the difference is yomu (read) versus nomu (drink). However, being the teacher, and thus (largely by default) her superior, she didn’t question my statement. A look took over her face, which told me she was thinking “wow, foreigners can speak English and READ water!!”
I have a good friend who once told a table of terrified students that he eats children for breakfast. He meant to say fruit.

Ah, autumn...

Autumn is here, heralded not by the vibrant reds and oranges of the Japanese maple, but by swarms of dragonflies. Although you see them during other times of the year, autumn is when dragonflies come stage front and steal the show. It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting on my tatami enjoying a coffee and the gentle breeze passing through the open windows of my apartment. The only disturbance is from the occasional intrepid dragonfly that flits in through the window, bumps curiously into lampshade, wall and paper screen before departing out of another window.
Had they been discovered after the advent of the helicopter, I’m sure they would have been called helicopter flies. They have four wings (albeit not at 90 degrees to each other as on a helicopter), their bodies resemble the tail of a helicopter (albeit without a rotor on the end), the head and eyes look like a cockpit (albeit without little men inside steering) and they can hover (actually, just like helicopters). Hm, maybe I’ve drunk too much coffee and maybe I’ve been staring at dragonflies out the window for too long…
The Japanese for dragonfly is tombo and the kanji is made up of two characters, both of which contain the character for insect. One kanji has the character for blue in it, but I can’t break down the other kanji (flying thing, maybe, at a guess). The Japanese find it fascinating that we call them “dragonflies” – it seems quite a dramatic name for an essentially harmless creature, certainly more dramatic than “blue flying insect.”
At elementary school this week one of the students (most probably a boy) discovered an interesting visitor, which looked as though it belonged in Alien 3 rather than an elementary school. The principal brought it over to me and said: “Excuse me, what is this in English?” I’d never seen anything like it. It seemed equally surprised to see me. They told me the Japanese name and I had a look in my dictionary. It turned out to be a mole cricket. After initial confusion regarding cricket the insect and cricket the sport, I got down to explaining what a mole was. I have a little Nintendo DS that allows me to draw in kanji or English, which the software will then translate into the desired language. I wrote in “mole” and showed my colleagues the kanji. It has two characters, the first I recognised as the kanji for earth (as in soil, not the planet). I then checked what the second kanji meant. Turns out that the Japanese call the humble, blind, bumbling mole, the “earth dragon.” I’m guessing there must have been a period several hundred years ago, during the construction of all the famous Kyoto Zen gardens, when the mole population reached infestation proportions, reeking havoc among the temples and bonsai. Gardens torn apart from below, the torment faced by shogun and gardener alike, surely a punishment from the gods. Yes, earth dragon makes perfect sense when viewed in this historical context.
One day I will sit down and learn the names of all the animals that I share my apartment with. The newest member of the gang goes by the name Argiope amoena or, would you believe it, the “St. Andrew’s Cross spider” given it’s English name. I first saw this spider on Sado Island and convinced myself that it must surely be confined to the island, in a Galapagos-type way, and that there was no conceivable way it could have made it across the sea onto the mainland. I clearly overlooked the thrice-daily ferry that runs from Joetsu to Sado… I found my fat, striped friend on the door handle of the apartment. As much of an animal lover as I am, my apartment is simply too small to share with a spider as scary looking as that. I rolled up a newspaper and swung baseball-style, hoping to send spider-chan for a home run into the nearest rice paddy. Sadly, he simply rearranged his footing slightly and settled back down into his web. On the fourth attempt I managed to get him onto the floor. I won’t describe what happened next, safe to say that he won’t be bothering us any more. I have since discovered that this species, though large and brightly coloured, is harmless, feeding on insects rather than humans. A website reassuring states that “their venom is not regarded as a serious medical problem for humans.” Phew!