This is a pen.

The 7th graders are now doing the indefinite article, a/an. Since Japanese doesn’t have articles, the subject is a difficult one. Japanese doesn’t even differentiate between plurals and singular nouns. Then there is the whole “uncountable” issue, where you don’t put a/an in front of uncountable nouns. You wouldnt say, “I have an ice cream” or “There is a water”. This is hard for the kids to get because you do count ice cream in Japanese. I was reminded about 50 times yesterday. I did my best to point out that they are counting servings of ice cream…and not the ice cream itself. But alas, I was met with a familiar, “it appears Americans….”, the teachers response to anything that contradicts the Japanese way.

The whole point of this indefinite article business is that Apology-sensei (my nickname for this teacher) had an award-winning story for practicing a/an.

Kind of like how most Americans can still remember some random phrase in the foreign language they learned in high school, all Japanese people know the basic English sentence, “This is a pen”. This is what we were practicing all day yesterday (and today too…). Simple as the sentence may be, it’s actually pretty hard since Japanese and English have practically nothing in common when it comes to grammar and sentence structure. After this, we moved onto “that”. Apology-sensei would hold up a card in front of the class and say, “This is an apple” and the kids would have to say “That is an apple” and so on. She then had a series of cards and wanted the kids to say, “That is a ~” in order. So begins the story.



“You are walking through the forest at night. What forest? I don’t know. It’s probably around here. Sasayama has lots of beautiful nature, you know. Anyway, in the middle of the forest you see…this.”

She slaps a picture of an apple on the black blackboard and the kids in unison emit the sounds needed to progress the story, “That is an apple”.

She continues, “The moonlit sky makes it hard to see exactly what the object in the forest is. You go in for a closer look and while you thought it was an apple, upon closer examination you see that it’s the red shine of a monkey’s butt.”

She slaps a picture of a monkey on the blackboard, making it wobble a bit. The kids let out a “That is a monkey”.

She carries on, “The monkeys butt shines bright under the moonlit sky, but you are not sure if that is really a monkey. You think that it may be out of season for the monkeys to be roaming the forests. Luckily for you the clouds are clearing and you can better see the object at hand. What you thought was a shiny red monkey butt, appears to be the red eye of a rabbit!”

She whacks the blackboard with a picture of a rabbit with two eerily red eyes. I’m beginning to worry about the workout she is giving this blackboard. The kids all scream, “That is a rabbit”.

Not one to end a story when it’s getting good, Apology-sensei presses on, “You are quietly observing the rabbit in the forest when the animal begins to move. It rustles around in the grass and turns all the way around when you notice something attached to its butt. It's this!”.

She slaps the poor blackboard again with a picture of a hand. “That is a hand”, the kids barely let out as they laugh uncontrollably.

Apology-sensei promises that her story will end soon and continues, “As the hand on the rabbit’s butt wiggles around, you notice that the fingers aren't moving as hands should”.

“But it’s on a rabbit’s butt!!!”, some wise child proclaims.

Apology-sensei defends her reasoning, “Yes, but hands should move as hands do whether they are on the behinds of animals or not. Anyway, the clouds are clearing out letting more and more of the moon’s light in the forest. You can now see that the hand’s fingers are very pointy and a bright golden colour. The moon’s light has fully lit up this mysterious scene and you can clearly see that what you have been staring at all along is...a queen!”

She slaps the final picture on the blackboard and the kids know what to do, “That is a queen!”

The kids continue laughing and a few offer their opinions on the story.

“Isn’t it awful that you mistook a queen for a monkey’s butt?”

“What is a queen doing in a forest?”

“Where can you find apples so big that they are the size of a monkey’s butt?”





180 degrees later, I thought I might try to let you know what is in the news in Japan. This is what was on the front page of the local newspaper today.

1.The governor of Hyogo prefecture, Mr. Ido, had a press conference where he announced that the possibility of another mass outbreak of the swine flu was very low and almost nil.
2. 22 people staying at a hotel in Mine, Yamaguchi prefecture, were admitted to the hospital when a fissure in the boiler smoke stack emits carbon monoxide into the hotel. One person has died of complications relating to the incident.
3. A man was released after 17 years in prison. He was proved innocent of a crime he claimed he was physically forced to confess, through beatings and such. (OK, this one I cheated and looked up online in English)