Catch up

Maybe I should back up and let you know what has been going on in the exciting life of me.

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August

In August, the schools had their summer “break”. By break, I mean that the kids didn’t go to class, but still came to school almost every day. Most of the sports teams held practice almost every day. They didn’t just practice for two hours either, most of these teams had a morning and afternoon practice that equaled a school day. Since I have no classes, I come to school and mostly plan for the next year. The upside of this is that I come to school wearing shorts. It makes the barely air conditioned sauna room they call an office a little bit better.

Some of the more exciting activities during August included: new ALTs, Brazilian BBQ/Karaoke in Kobe, Dekansho festival*, eating okonomiyaki at a co-wokers house, trying to get internet to said new ALTs, volunteering to teach a group of housewives* and a cocktail party to start off the fall semester at school.

The Dekansho festival is the annual summer festival here in Sasayama. Summer festivals in Japan are pretty fun. The American equivalent would be like a state/county fair. During the summer festivals here, they usually have a lot of food stalls selling your fatty greasy matsuri foods like fried chicken, fried potatoes (French fries), fried cake…you get the picture. My favourite new thing this year was fried monjayaki. It was amazing, comparable to what would happen if you fried chicken tetrazzini or something else that really shouldn’t be fried.

After the festival, me and my Canadian went to a local karaoke bar to make new friends. We sang some great hits and had the bar clapping or more. One of our new friends gave Joy his happi coat. On the way out, we took pictures in the black bean fields.

Regarding the housewife teaching, I was asked to be a part of an English conversation group that included mostly man-crazy housewives. The topics each week usually revolved around their new idol crush. One lady has the hots for pretty much any Korean actor or singer. I taught them some important words like “trashy”, “ghetto” and the phrase “junk in the trunk”.

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September

School started early this semester because of the pig flu (floink) back in May. (They had some classes to make up from missing a week while scared of the impending pandemic.)

The annual sports festival was held in September. It was delayed one day because of rain. This year, they asked me to take pictures. I wasn’t really sure what they wanted me to take pictures of. The only instructions I got were, “get some of the students”. Since I had planned on taking pictures only of the batons and red cones, I was helped immensely by these instructions. I tried to take some of the students, but since I’m not really treated like a real teacher here, it’s really difficult to figure out my boundaries. Some of the teachers would march into the field during the middle of an event without any problem, but every time I went to pass the sacred rope, they all gave me evils. So I asked many times if it was ok, and the only answer I got was, “well…please don’t get in the way.” Since I had planned to take portraits of the students while laying in the middle of the track, this helped me out immensely.

Japanese manners are impossible to figure out, so I just gave up and for fear of being treated like a student rather than an invisible tape recorder I took their “well…” as meaning “No” and took landscape shots from behind the rope. The teachers seemed happy enough with their poorly executed photos, so they didn’t even use mine anyway.

At the party with the teachers afterwards, I sat next to the history teacher who I used to teach English with. While the rest of the teachers drunkenly harassed the mousy women, this teacher told me about Sasayama during wartime from his mother’s memories. I found the whole situation odd, but appropriate.

Thanks to the Happy Monday System, Japan was blessed with a five-day weekend in late September. This weekend was called “Silver Week”, a smaller version of the “Golden Week” spring break in April. I planned to go to Tokyo and meet my friend Zach there. While in Tokyo, I would meet up with some friends from university.

While in Tokyo I went to the Tsukiji fish market, which I’ve been meaning to go to since I first came to Japan in 2002. Tsukiji is Japan’s biggest fish market and packed with every kind of seafood imaginable. This also means that sushi restaurants in Tsukiji have the freshest seafood. So I had the mandatory sushi breakfast. Tsukiji is very busy in the morning and the fish mongers were all zooming around on their little carts. Lots of tourists come to see Tsukiji which makes the markets even busier and more dangerous.

Elsewhere in Tokyo, I went to the salt and tobacco museum (surprisingly interesting), the parasite museum (complete with a 9m long tapeworm), some right wing museum about the great friendship between Hitler and Japan and everywhere in between.

In the last weekend of September I went to visit my friend’s family. They live in another country town a couple prefectures over. They live next to the local loudspeaker/alarm, which sounded at noon. When I say sounded, I mean it could have deafened anyone (and probably has) standing too near it. We were in the middle of lunch and all of a sudden this air raid siren just went off. Everyone in the family went along with their normal conversation while I ducked for cover. You couldn’t hear a single thing other than this siren, it was that obnoxiously loud. I asked the family why the siren goes off every day at noon and not a one could answer that. How Japanese.

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October

October began with a birthday party for those of us with late September, early October birthdays. The theme of the party was “stereotypes”. We had to dress as the stereotype of our country. As an American, I pulled out a tacky shirt, made it tackier by attaching red, white and blue ribbons to it, made a belt to hold my guns (nicknamed: freedom, democracy, liberty and 1776), cut up a pair of old jeans to make some jorts and fashioned myself a blonde mullet. Other Americans came as: a cowboy, a gangster, a jew, an evangelical and a wal-mart shopper. Through no coincidence, all three Canadians came as lumberjacks. Japanese friends came as either a Japanese punk or a schoolgirl/boy. Good times.

About the middle of October, the fall festival was held at the shrine near my house. This festival is famous for starting fights between the yakuza. I missed it last year and there were a record number of fights, so I made sure to go this year. Unfortunately there weren’t too many fights because the cops had warned everyone. Since it’s near my house, a lot of my students were there. The girls were dressed like prostitutes and the boys like a blind mole rat picked out their pajamas, nothing unusual there.

Since Halloween has been getting pretty popular in Japan, the elementary schools all wanted me to do a Halloween lesson. I actually got to do a fun lesson with one school. They asked me what Americans schools do for Halloween and I told them about the Halloween parties in elementary school. I was pretty surprised when the teachers requested to have an “American Halloween party”.

We got the fifth and sixth graders together in one room and I prepared a bunch of games for them to play. We played a game where they have to go a relay with an apple, a build the skeleton game, pin the nose on the witch and wrap a mummy. They especially loved the toilet paper mummy game commenting on its “American-ness”. We listened to some Halloween music and then I served them apple cider that I made. Apple cider is not really a Halloween drink I know, but it’s a fall drink.

The cider was an adventure in itself. I gave a list of the ingredients to the teacher in charge and he said he would buy them for me. I knew this would end up with something wrong, but I let him buy them anyway. Considering the list of ingredients was “4 litres of apple juice” and “1 package of brown sugar”, I didn’t think there would be a mistake. When I came to school that day to prepare the cider, on my desk were two bottles of apple juice and two bottles of soda pop. I forgot that in Japan they have this strange drink called “saidaa (cider)” that is pretty much just a lemon pop. Once again, I had said something, a teacher had heard me but didn’t listen and just wrote down what he thought I said. The story of my time here in Japan, the teachers always know better than I do. So I had to run to the grocery store, get the right stuff and managed to make some hot apple cider in time. It wasn’t real apple cider, just apple juice with more sugar and spices, but it turned out ok and most of the kids loved it (including the teachers).

Speaking of actual Halloween, I went to a “club” event here in Sasayama on actual Halloween night. A local restaurant removed its chairs, and some of its tables, and became a club for the night It was a Sasayama experience to say the least. I wasn’t even aware there were enough people under the age of 40 to fill a room, much less a restaurant.

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November

I began November in Adelaide, South Australia to celebrate the wedding of a fellow English teacher here in Sasayama. She was getting married to a Japanese guy, and they decided to have the ceremony in Australia. The groom’s family doesn’t speak English, so they asked me to go with them to Australia to assist. His family is really nice, but they don’t get out much. Altogether, I led a group of five people. One or two of them had been overseas before, but that must have been when Japan annexed Korea and half of East Asia. Considering I had never been to Australia before, there was a lot of confusion most of the time getting there.

After a memorable trip we all finally got there and had a good time. The bride is Vietnamese and the ceremony was…quite Vietnamese. During the actual ceremony in the morning, all of a sudden I became part of the wedding procession. I had no idea what was going on and I was given a roast suckling pig.

The reception was held in the evening. A Vietnamese reception is quite the party. I don’t know how many courses came out; it was hard to count when there’s a Vietnamese drama being performed in front of you.

I only spent five days there, with one of those days in Sydney. Luckily I’m going back to Australia in a few weeks since I couldn’t say no to the two people who invited me. Such a terrible life I know.

During the third week in November the ALTs in Hyogo prefecture had our mid-year conference. As expected, the conference was a waste of time and money. It’s frustrating since bringing all of the ALTs could be a very good opportunity to discuss furthering English education and really help many of us out, which in turns helps out the students. But instead, the conference is just the usual façade of boring worthless speeches and lectures. One particularly frustrating moment was when the head of the BOE spoke and ended his “speech” with a lecture about being on time and doing our job properly. In a display of passive-aggressiveness, he chose to make vague references to a few issues that some people have instead of actually dealing with the individuals making the problem. Being the self-righteous person I am, I wrote a long message to the BOE explaining that this speech was not only condescending and insulting but downright rude to the majority of employees that do their job and often go above what the job requires. I’m sure the BOE’s garbage can is enjoying it as we speak.

We had our annual Sasayama Thanksgiving dinner the last Friday of the month. I tried to get a turkey but ended up failing. That’s all I have to say about that.

I also went fishing at Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest lake, in November. I’d seen Lake Biwa once, but never been up close. No one caught anything, and I found out later that no one intended to keep anything. Apparently catch and release is the thing to do. There’s no law saying you can’t keep the fish you caught, but Japanese people would much rather buy their fish in a store. I didn’t get it. I’m just of the opinion that hobbies should produce something besides cold hands and lost hooks.