Pacific Saury

Today at school they are having some sort of seminar in the afternoon. From what I can decipher it’s: Special (….something) School Racial Educational Seminar. All I can imagine is a poorly executed diversity training session like from The Office or something. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they just have a sampling of different races and parade them down a catwalk while announcing the species and habits of the race currently on show. Although it’s probably something completely different, but there’s too much kanji on the sign and I’m not invited.

In an attempt to fight the effects of coming into work by 8:14 everyday, I’ve bought a jar of instant coffee. I’ve always stayed away from the stuff because well…I don’t live in a trailer. But in Japan it’s perfectly acceptable to put boiling water in a cup with dehydrated coffee from a glass jar. There are actually more choices in the grocery stores for instant coffee than real coffee. You can get coffee in a can, in candy, dehydrated, in a plastic bottle and ice cold, but oddly enough it’s hard to find decent ground coffee.

Another random note is the school lunch we ALTs endure in Japan. Actually it’s not all that bad 90% of the time, but you can get some pretty sketchy things. Students are all pretty much forced to eat school lunch; I haven’t seen anyone bring their lunch. In theory it’s completely voluntary. Similar to how in theory the Soviet Union was democratic. You are free to choose whatever you like, providing of course you choose the only option available. I was pretty impressed by the amount of food offered. On good days, you end up quite full. School lunch is always offered with a small loaf of bread or a gigantic bowl of white rice. So no matter the actual food, you always have an Atkins-unfriendly amount of carbs. At least at our school, the bread is amazing. Japanese bread tends to have a sweet and unfluffly feeling to it. But since school lunch is supposed to be made without any preservatives or artificial flavours, it’s the one area of Japanese food that isn’t chopped full of questionable science projects. The kids probably hate the bread because it doesn’t taste like cake though. Today was some weird Chinese stew thing and tomorrow is a mystery fish. I say mystery because I looked it up in the dictionary and it is “Sea Bass”. Which although sounds familiar, I’m guessing it’s not a Midwest speciality. Last week we had something called the “Pacific Saury”. Apparently it’s a fall specialty. The kanji for the fish name literally mean “Autumn” “Sword” Fish”.

Today in one of my classes we played a sort of relay game. I included questions like “Do you have to go to school?”, “Will you sleep tonight?” and the mind-bender “What do you have to study?”. The kids seemed to really enjoy it and they were getting the answers right most of the time. These are kids who most of the time, stare at you like zombies if you say ANYTHING to them in English. They know this stuff. It’s the annoying Japanese culture point of wanting to conform to everyone else. Maybe the enlightenment will hit this island soon, but until then independence and liberty will have to remain foreign and uncool.