Culture Festival and Language Learning

School Culture Festival

Bunka-sai, or the Culture Festival, was two Saturday’s ago. And yes, occasionally you have to work on a Saturday, for the price of a Monday off. At least they got rid of the 6-day school week a few years ago. Though most students, and most teachers still end up at school 6 or 7 days a week.

After each class performing two songs in a singing competition, the real fun began. Each class then competed for the most fun and interesting room. My job was to walk around and have fun.

My three favorites were
-Target Practice: One class created a horse out of a rolly-chair which you then got pulled across the room on, shooting arrows at targets for prizes.
-A giant board game with mini-games like guess the weight, mini-fishing and transferring beans with chopsticks.
-A Spring theme where I got my photo as Totoro.

I also lost in an arm-wrestling to 15-year old, with lots of people watching. In my credit, he’s the only one in the school who seems to have already hit and probably finished puberty, and it was a real battle.

The day ended with most of the losing 3^rd grade class crying because they lost. I’ve been told the time spent in Jr. High school is considered to be the best years of ones lives and each class wants to go out with a bang. Tough to celebrate and listen to the winning song while hearing sobs and sniffles.

Learning Japanese and English

Today I had no classes because of end of semester exams. So I studied almost 6 hours, all from a grammar textbook. This drive to study has only just arrived for me. I think I realized I could be putting a lot more effort into learning Japanese. Also that learning grammar is much more essential than learning vocabulary or kanji (characters). Now it still takes me a little time to plan out what I’m going to say, but I can make quite a variety of sentences. I think it takes additional time because one has to rearrange the sentence components in order to translate. For instance...

I want to say. At 3pm, I read a book in the library.

In Japanese, the order is I, at 3pm, in the library, book, read

So in Japanese Watashi wa, gogo no sanji ni, toushokan de, hon wo, yomimashita

Sticking with language, while drinking in Tokyo, some dude mentioned speaking Spanish, and I said I could. I was wrong. When I tried, nothing but a 50 50 mix of Span-nese came out; Japanese must be pushing Spanish out of my brain’s foreign language center. I had always heard you should try to learn a 3^rd language in a 2^nd language and so forth. Pretty interesting.

Another funny thing is that most Japanese have a lot of trouble with saying English syllables. Which is not a surprise. I’ve come to realize the great difficulty of speaking and learning English. In Japanese, there are about 80 or so distinct syllables which are strung together to make words, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t. English must have at least double that, and then there's the combining of syllables together and the choice of which to stress or draw out.

How do Japanese people deal with this?

They use their syllabary to create the English syllables which works surprisingly well, but still with far from perfect results. Thus words like oh-sue-tah-rah-lee-ah, (Australia), which look ridiculous can sound like English when the syllables are combined. Also, some of the Japanese syllables are perfect matches, but you wouldn’t think so. To pluralize any noun, they had –zu. Zu? Yes. i.e. Speakers. Su-pee-ka-zu, besides that final R it is right on. Well maybe you have to hear it.

Flowercare, preventers of DWIs, and poison tasting: a job for Principal-man.

Obviously they do more than this. But the occupational heirarchy here rewards the oldest for a few years before they retire.

1. I had heard about the principal's job as head gardener, but was unsure whether it was really true. My first day at Suda elementary, I made sure to compliment the flowers, then act surprised when the principal said that they were his responsiblity.
My neighbor, Joe-sensei, told a story of his principal really stressed out one day. He asked why? The Board of Education was coming. But not to visit the classes or school, but for the school garden judging contest.

2. The principals always eat first but I figured they just didn't want to wait. I was astonished when the teachers told me it's a tradition that the principals try the school lunch first, to make sure it's not spoiled or poisoned.

3. The drink limit for drunk driving in Japan is like one, and the punishment, strict. Apparently if you're a teacher, some responsibility falls on the principal, too. The principal loses a portion of his retirement if a teacher is arrested for DWI. How ridiculous. So we are frequently given speeches and pamphlets on drunk driving.

Drugs are bad
Even bigger news lately is another ALT from Kamisu, about a half hour away, got arrested for 11 grams of pot. Everyone was given a copy of four articles on the arrest, from papers all over Japan. There was a 15 minute meeting for everyone to discuss the matter. It blew people's minds that a teacher had drugs. Their reaction and the Japanese media's and justice system blew my mind at least 5x more. They don't seem to discriminate between drugs here, heroin's the same as pot as far as they're concerned, both illegal. And if it's illegal, then you're a total social deviant. So the dude has to wait in jail for 22 days until prosecution. If he's lucky he'll be deported.

That day, I decided it was time to remove suspicion; my hippy long hair had to go. Actually, it was just about time, so I went to the local surf shop/salon, an interesting combination. Mostly a salon, but it had 8 boards, some gear, surf DVD’s and magazines, and photos of the owner surfing Indo all over the walls. In fact, he used to be a Japanese pro, and he was my barber.

I hadn’t really thought through how I would communicate the subtleties of my desired haircut, and a drawing did not seem to suffice. I was then handed a magazine of ultra hip Japanese haircuts to choose from. It was then I got worried. Luckily a friend who spoke Japanese came, and now I have a great haircut, shortest it’s been since my mid teens buzz cut. My haircut was a big hit with the Jr. High girls, they even braved the use of English to tell me. Let me correct that it was much more than a haircut. Two hair washes, a facial, an eye glasses clean, and a short shiatsu as well as a robotic and a scalp massage. The whole process lasted nearly two hours. ahhh, Japanese service.

Two surf stories

Thousands of dragonflies migrating along the coast, not one moving in the other direction.

And this was from a few weeks ago (see above, breaking further out, thus bigger than it looks).

I surfed my nearest spot, which I found out is called Number Five (for the No 5 jetty), but it was pretty big, breaking so far out and I kept getting caught inside. So based on a previous exploratory mission I headed to the beaches to the south, where the outer bar breaks more softly, leaving a decent inside break.

The crappy part is that a section of the road that runs parallel and right along the beach, is privately owned and the owner decided to f the town and shut down his part. I figured I’d take it anyway but I came upon a barking guard dog so took a small inland detour. I rode through an abandoned campsite. I had to throw my bike and surfboard over a fence and then jump it, with two painters working close by. I felt like a spy, heading into the dark heart of Hasaki town. The evil owner and his henchman, trying to hide a conspiracy from under the noses of the innocent townspeople. The surfer, just looking for waves, innocently trespasses onto a dark secret.

Eventually I made it to a real beach break, but it was kinda closing out. Oh well.
And on the way back, I also stumbled upon the local shrine.

Tokyo Disneyland: The worlds #1 amusement park

we got there at 8, for the gates opening, and stayed until 8. I had a great time.

the differences

everyone wears tons of disney gear, like 9 out of every 10 teenage girls had extravagant minnie ears clipped to their hair.

it was christmas time already, nov 11th. As soon as the Halloween theme comes to a close, (which they dont celebrate so much as embrace the season commercially), Christmas enters.

and gift giving is huge here. Because I went to Disney, I was probably supposed to buy a little gift, like cookies, for all or at least some of my co workers. (But if I keep it secret, then I don't have to buy them anything. A bus trip to Disney hardly seems like an event to bring souvenirs back for people.) The up side is I often end up with bean paste sweets or chocolate on my desk. There are tons of gift shops, and they were all packed.

I saw a 100 person line for curry flavored popcorn, one vendor, mustve taken at least half an hr. i took a picture, they werent happy. The Japanese seem pretty good about following the rules, and being American, one gets used to breaking them and keeps it up while over here. we, or at least I, call it a gaijin (meaning foreigner) smash. When we pulled up to the park on the disney bus and saw the giant mtn, i yelled Fuji san like an excited tourist. we, and I'm sure the other bus riders, got a big laugh out of it. I could see some vicariously enjoying the breaking of social rules. Like all the laughs Joe got when he bearhugged one of the country bears from behind. "those crazy gaijin"

they love only certain disney movies.

Every girl has a stitch doll, from Lilo & Stitch. Nightmare before Christmas is huge. It seems the common demonimator is cute AND scary monsters. maybe they mix up kowai (scary) and kawaii (cute) in their brains. Sarcasm, but I sure mix those up. Also kirai is dislike, kirei is beautiful, and karai is spicy. ahh.

the lines were long, but we played fun mind games to kill the time, like I'm going to a picnic, ghost the letter game, and a japanese game popular at drinking parties, Chun Chun. everyone has two thumbs up, then u say chun chun and a #. if u guess the # of thumbs up, adding them all together, u can take a hand away. loser is the one with a hand left.

We played for embarassing dares, like having to wait on line at the famous picture spot, and kissing belle from beauty in the beast, alone. Or yelling things. Or eating weird things.

An accidental gaijin smash.

In the beginning we were chun chun novices, and thought you said chin chin then the #. Well chin chin means penis in Japanese. So on line for Peter Pan, all these kids around, we were saying in essence saying, penis 2! penis 5! This shouldve been evident in students trying to ask you, what's this, pointing to their chin? twice. But we had forgotten. Sorry Peter Pan kids.