Kids

It's the beginning of a long weekend (suck it Australia) and I've opted to begin it with a few drinks and an otherwise relaxed night. I just taught my kindergarten class at the conversation school next door after a big running session after school. All the clubs have been running for what I assume is for fitness but it's good for me to.
I haven't posted in a while despite previous suggestions that I would and in the absence of anything really important to blog about I thought I would begin a series detailing the inhabitants of my schools. I won't be going student by student of course, more a brief examination of the various categories they could slot into. So without further adieu;

"the desk is my canvas"
We're all a victim of this. We're faced with a boring situation that we're bound to commit to and all we have is a pencil in one hand and a blank desk in front of us. Oh sure, it begins with a scribble of the name, a scribble of 'hello'. Why not add some flowers, some animals, some other catchphrases? It's not long until the desk is at least half covered in the inane imaginings of a teenager. I have been witness to desk size portraits of faces, craploads of stickers, song lyrics and more recently a quite well drawn picture of a scooter. It is no doubt a combination of boring classes and a desire to express themselves in gray lead/table format but it's all entertaining for me.

"blink once for yes, blink twice for no"
The student that appears to be so utterly vacant that all of their bodily resources appear to be dedicated to important bodily functions, blinking, and looking stupid. Due to the system of Junior High School in Japan these students can actually advance years without being able to do anything. These students never give any input under any situations even when being directly spoken to, will leave worksheets completely untouched and have severely restricted facial expression. They stare ahead in class but appear not to be looking at anything and any thoughts about what they're pondering only ends up depressing me. They scare me a little.

"did you get lost?"
A seven year old walks into the class and sits down. Only, they're not 7 years old they just look exactly like it. Some students in Japan look so severely underaged that it looks as if they have been skipped ahead. Generally they're totally adorable and their marks are only average but they are definitely where they are supposed to be. On the flip side there are some elementary school students that look much older than they are. I don't really know why this is but people keep thinking that I'm 25 or older so I guess I fall into a similar category.

Shit.

More next time. I wrote out a list when I was bored at school so at the very least expect a few of these.

See the World

It's culture festival time ladies and gentlemen so strap on your bonnets, tip your top hats and sit down for the wild ride ahead. The term 'culture festival', for me at least, arouses such images as aboriginals doing their thing, stalls of food etc. A culture festival in a school probably has like a crepe stand, or someone singing a song in French or something. Generally it's all something we've seen before but at the very least it puts a welcome blip on our daily life seismograph.

So what does a Japanese cultural festival entail? Well. It's not so much 'culture' as it is essentially a day-long performing arts night. About a week and a half ago I went to school on a Saturday for my smaller schools' culture festival (Ogawa). It had been coming up for quite a while and I guess there was what you could call 'hype' about it. One of my students for the speech contest was a member of the student council so she was practicing for 4 performances on top of the speech contest (possibly why she came 4th...) and she would sometimes tell me the goings on.

(class 3-1 singing)

It all began at 8:45am with the choral competition where each class sang a song and all the teachers judged them. After this ordeal it was the PTA's turn to sing. I was invited to join the PTA choir and I was sort of keen to sing a song in Japanese so this was a lot of fun for me! We had practiced a few times and we were sounding good! We sang our songs very well and the students liked that I was singing in Japanese so that was probably my highlight for the day.

(Student Council Taiko performance)

After a break the day became interesting. All the windows were covered up and it sort of became like a talent show minus judging. It began with this awesome, fantastic taiko performance which was really, really cool. From then on, however, it was plagued with poor organisation, microphone issues and a nasty case of quantity over quality. I feel obliged at this stage to point out that when it comes to events like these I compare it to performing arts nights at my highschool. Everything was well planned, the performances were top-notch and it was generally pretty impressive. Of course it's not fair to compare the two as performing arts is a bigger deal in schools in Australia than it is in Japan...

But to the student's credit some of the bands were pretty cool. The microphones weren't working properly so it was impossible to hear the singer most of the time but they did look pretty cool up on stage. All the students watching would rush up to the front and mosh every time a band came on. The dances and singing all looked like they were conceived the night before and yet I know that can't be the case as all the 3rd years had special t-shirts signifying the occasion. One redeeming act was the whole school choir who sang this amazing song with awesome harmonies and everything.



The 3rd year students also sang a song in English! "We are the World" is one of those charity songs that never goes very far but holds a decent melody. The 3rd year English teacher had been making the students sing it in English class and so I think the tone was slightly mocking but they tried their hardest with each member singing a sentence each. They didn't have to perform it on stage like that - they chose to! Which I'm going to take as a good thing.

Next cultural festival was at Bato. This festival also began with a choral competition only this time I had heard most of the songs from my prior cultural festival (I was an expert at this stage) which made things, like, massively interesting for me.......
I offered to join the PTA choir at this school but it I couldn't go to any rehearsal so I was surprised to find out (on stage) that they had a skit and dance moves involved with the first song. I should have known that something like this would happen and it was su-per embarrassing to be standing there on stage watching everyone do things that I didn't know about in front of the whole school. The second song was kinder to my soul (*sigh*) and involved simple standing and singing...

(The 1st years contribution. Flipping cards that spelled various things I couldn't understand)

After this experience, instead of having bands and so on perform, each class had to put on a skit. Some were interesting and funny. Some were awful. It was a bit of a mixed bag really but again - it was fun to see my students up on stage doing something fun like that so I didn't mind sitting there all day again.

(Some art from the students at Bato)

After both of the cultural festivals there was a drinking party with the teachers. These parties usually cost something like 4000yen (which is like what, $47? I don't know exactly) and are supposed to include all I can drink but as I live about half an hour away by car, I have to drive. Which makes these nights an expensive endeavour indeed! I do like spending time with the teachers in an informal setting though and everyone is more inclined to speak English to me when they've been drinking which is nice.

In both cases it was an interesting experience to observe. I'm sure the students had a good time too and that's the goal really so mission accomplished!

P.S. Couldn't really be bothered dealing with formatting issues so it's pretty much picture, writing, picture, writing...... as you probably know at this stage.

P.P.S. I read some of Averil Byrne's emails and boy she has a poetic way of putting things. I'm sorry my best writing is of cynicism and sarcasm. It's what I do best. Apparently.

P.P.P.S. Halloween was last weekend! I went to a halloween party on the Sunday. I was a pirate.

kris.

Talk Like That

Last Friday was the English speech contest for both of my schools. Six schools in total competed (two of those being my schools) and I think the outcome was quite good! Leading up to this day there had been many after school rehearsals and I was staying back every day to help these students. I didn't really WANT to stay back after school but it seemed like the right thing to do - plus I think I was expected to... being the only native English speaker at hand. At both schools the students were chosen and they wrote up their speech in Japanese, which was then translated into 'English' by the Japanese English teachers and then in turn was turned into English by me. I'm sure that by the end of this process it had lost a lot of its intended meaning but that wasn't my job - I just had to make sure they could say things properly.

I'll break it down into steps so you don't begin to go cross-eyed from the sheer amount of text in this blog.

Step 1; Choose the Students
Not many students were particularly willing to do this contest and I mean, who could blame them? Teachers therefore had to choose students and then convince them to do it. I didn't really play a part in this step I was just told who was going to do it. Two first year students, a boy and a girl, were chosen at one school and after listening to them a bit we had to choose who would be better. The girl was better although her speech was a little boring but we went with her anyway. Also, One boy wanted to do the speech contest so we had to choose him even though he wasn't particularly good at speaking. He wants to be a paramedic (which was also the topic of his speech) so he thought doing things like the speech contest would give him some mental strength. To be honest I'm not really 100% on his motivation but to his credit he tried really hard and he was fun to teach so I didn't care.


Step 2; Choose the speech topics
The decided topics ranged from talking about a local form of pottery, to the dreams of the students, to the use of the steep hill before the entrance of the school as a metaphor of life. That latter speech won. I almost had a student who was going to do the whole speech from the perspective of a cat but he lost out to the pottery girl in the selection to see who would represent the first year. My goal was to avoid speeches about learning English as it would have been su-per boron and unoriginal and I succeeded for the most part... one of my girls did a speech entitled 'Words From the Heart' which doesn't so much talk about speaking English, as it does speaking in general. To quote;

" Even if we live in different places, greet each other in different ways

and speak different languages, we all greet each other from the Heart "

As you can probably pick up even from that one sentence, these speeches are pretty cheesy. Many students had lines like "a smile can help anyone", or "I want everyone to have dreams to make them happy like me". I think it's just the nature of the competition to be campy so I was making them smile all the time and so on.

Step 3; Pronounciation

Had to begin by ironing out some pesky accent issues (Shince instead of Since) but that wasn't nearly as hard as trying to get them to reproduce the 'R' sound and the 'Th' sound. You all probably know the difficulty some Japanese people have distinguishing between the two. They can actually make the 'l' sound fairly easily as it involves the tongue hitting the front teeth they just need to remember to do it...but the 'r' sound is quite hard! the tongue doesn't hit anything it just sits at the back and the tip raises up so saying words like 'remember' and 'reminds' took some practice. The 'Th' worked out to be ok in the end but it went through the stage of sounding like an 's' (sanks) to the 'f' stage (fanks) and then finally to the 'th' stage (thanks).

" Team sports are played with the cooperation of all of the teams members "

Step 4; Intonation
When Japanese people speak it all sounds like a flat, monotonous blargle (just made that word up then). They do have some kind of intonation which allows them to differentiate between two words that are identical (hana vs. ha˹na; nose vs. flower... or maybe it's the other way around) but it's no where near the level we talk. So I spent a little while drawing intonation maps for the students showing when we go up and down all that stuff. The students had to learn their entire speech in another language and on top of that learn where to put their voice. I could tell how hard it was when sometimes they would forget the intonation and it would just sound super weird and they couldn't hear it. Most students picked up on it fairly quickly though but that was only the beginning!

____/\____/`\_____/\_ ____/`\__________/`\________________/`\________/\_

"Since I was a little girl, I was always with my Grandparents because my parents were very
/\__
busy "

Step 5; Gestures
On top of remaining fairly low key when they talk, Japanese people don't really use facial expressions or body gestures to emphasise their point. At one point I suggest a student raise her eyebrows when she talk and after a brief struggle she could move them but it just looked odd. One girl managed to use her eyebrows in a natural fashion (that is to say, subtly) but she wasn't that good at speaking so it didn't really count for much I'm afraid. I had the students use some hand gestures but not too many, I didn't want it to look like a drama monologue (as awesome as that would have been). Some other students in the actual competition were going a bit over the top with their hands to the point of hilarity.

______/\_________/ \_______/\_____/ \___________/ \_________

"But I don't mind at all, because I have a dream to become a voice actress"

------(shake head)-------(look at someone new)---- (SMILE)----------

Step 6; Polish
This was after we had all been practicing too much and I thought the speeches were fine but were still sitting there listening to them over and over again. By the end of rehearsals I could recite all 6 speeches from plain rote memorisation from having the students repeat after me. I was teaching things like when 'an' is used in front of a word they sort of mould together, for example, an interesting = a ninteresting. Small things that don't really matter much but that I may as well help with anyway.

Finally they had to perform and they all performed well with no one forgetting their speech or anything which was a relief. I had 6 students participating (3 from each school, one for each year level) and out of those 6, two students came first - 'steep hill = life' girl, and 'voice actress' girl. The rest went really well with two seconds places and two fourth places (6 contestants in each category). Which means my region won two of the three trophies which is pretty good I think.

The only problem? Now those students have to compete in the prefectural level which MEANS I now have to keep up the rehearsals. Not as late as before mind, but the speeches are boring to me now so I don't really want to keep listening to them over and over again. This was originally going to be a small blog but I thought i'd flesh it out and now it's quite lengthy! my next blog will be after the 3rd of November and I'll be writing about the cultural festivals at both of my schools.

__/\____

Excitement!

Again. no pictures. Next blog. Plenty of pictures. Promise. Even a video or two! WOOO

kris.

P.S. Formatting on Blogger is shit. It's one of the biggest things I need to deal with when writing these blogs and it alone makes me not want to write them. I've been trying to get the intonation to match up with where they should be for AGES and it is just. not. working. You know the intonation. Imagine it's right.

Cinders

There are no classes today so I'm wasting my time/life waiting for the day to be over. I've tried studying Japanese but I feel I've moved too far in my textbook without a stronger foundation so I have to go back to the fiiiiirst text book which I don't have anymore. So scratch that option, and scratch making worksheets as I've made 2 already. So what does that leave? A blog I suppose.

Let me tell you about yesterday because nothing of interest has happened today.

I was at my big school yesterday. The head English teacher was out for the day due to some 'medical check' which was left ominously open to my interpretation. I hope it's nothing serious but the day before she was wearing both pants and glasses which I have never seen her wear before. Spooky.

So instead I was helping to teach the 2nd year students. They're a good bunch I think. They listen, pay attention and they try occasionally and frankly that's all I could ever ask for. We were teaching how to say "I like/want to verb a noun" eg. I like to eat sushi. I want to travel the world etc. We had an interview-type activity I had prepared but I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't overly interesting, but, it's an excuse to get the students out of their seats and that perks them up a little bit.

For lunch I was eating with the 1st years (class 1-1) and today the principle of the school was eating there too so I had a bit of a chat with him. He likes the thought of talking to me in English and me answering him in Japanese. So we did that for while but I had to dash off to my other junior high school because they wanted to take photos for the graduation year book. They asked me to wear a suit so I donned the only one I brought with me to Japan which apparently is now a little too big? I don't think I've lost weight (but I don't have a scale to check) so I think it might have always been a bit loose. The photo's were done in about 5 minutes so I went back to the big junior high school because they had a fire drill!

But this was no ordinary fire drill! For one thing people actually ran to the evacuation area! I'm so used to the slow walking and searching for friends that normally happens when there was a fire drill at high school. Also, they had the firemen come and do some displays so we got to see; an earthquake simulation; they set stuff on fire and showed how to use a fire extinguisher; and they also set up a smoky tent to recreate a building on fire. However the festivities (festivities?) were cut short when a HUGE slap of thunder cracked and scared everyone. It then began to rain, then pour and then stop completely.

All the rain had one teacher check what the phrase is. "It rains cat and dog?" "mmm? Oh! It's raining cats and dogs, yeah!". He printed off something to let everyone know about our unusual idiom and it lead a discussion as to why some English words are so (A good man vs. a nice man, Delicious vs. yummy, and so on).

Theeen it was practice for the speech contest.

Theeen it was practice for the PTA choir. I've gotten a lot better at the songs we're singing - it's a lot of fun! Look up 'donnatokimo' on youtube, it's by Maki.... something. Makihara? I can't remember.

Hope everyone is well! Sorry no pictures this time! You can IMAGINE the girls screaming because of the thunder, or the students laughing at the other students in the earthquake simulator... it was pretty funny. So until next time!

Family Man

I promised to write a blog on my family and so I've finally found some time to write one! Today I was at my school for a whopping 12.5 hours due to speech contest practice and then choir practice ... but more on that later. Let's cover the the family affairs first before I forget any of them.

Prior to the arrival of my family I had had quite a busy week and although I knew they were coming on the weekend I never really thought about it until Friday night when I realised I didn't actually know what time they were arriving in Japan so I set my alarm to wake me up early juuuuust in case. The plan was that my parents would call me when they arrived and then catch a bus to a nearby city and I would pick them up from there. It sounds lazy on my behalf because it is but, I mean, it takes some serious hauling of ass to get to the airport and this particular bus is an easy way to get from point A (airport) to point B (Utsunomiya). In any case my caution was worth the bleary eyes in the morning as it was a fairly early arrival, not EARLY early but you know ... before 12.

The reason my family (consisting of Mum, Dad, Kate and Tim) had decided to come in that particular week is because Japan has a bunch of public holidays strewn together in a phenomenon known as 'Silver Week'. Why not golden week you ask? Well the more astute amongst you may recall a golden week way back in the year in some month that I don't remember. The two holiday periods shared a marked resemblance in that I have no idea what any of the individual holidays are for, I'm quite busy in them and finally ... the traffic is pretty much a bitch. Unfortunately my family received the brunt of this increase in vehicular vessels on the road whilst traversing Japan on the bus. After a long plane flight they were then cramped up in a bus for several hours but EVENTUALLY they reached Utsunomiya where I picked them up and we began by cramming everything into my car...

Which was rather comical and brings to mind this particular scene, but after we all piled ourselves in we began our journey home (at this point I should recognise that before the car ride we went to go visit a shrine but I've left that out as it's not really amazing news now is it?). Everyone fell asleep in the car ride home so our first order of business upon arrival to my abode was a nap. Prior to arrival in Nippon we never really worked out what we wanted to do so after the nap we discussed details and plans.


(above from left; outside a shrine, boiling ramen)

First I wanted to show them my town, where I live and what not to let them know that I'm not living in a death trap or hell hole. On that thought we went to the graveyard near my house which is quit picturesque and gives a nice view of the town. I showed them the wonders of Trial, we fed some fish, Mum checked out the library and Dad gave an intriguing and in depth insight into the wonders of Japanese plumbing and heating/cooling. I showed them my favourite ramen place, we ate okonomiyaki, we went to patisseries ... we did a lot of eating.


I had 6 days of holiday, followed by one day of work, followed by the weekend which worked out due to an extremely nifty combo of the aforementioned public holidays and compensation for attending a sports day earlier in the month. With all this time free it made sense to go out and explore some more of Japan and the rational choice was to head north because A) I could drive there and B) I'd never been there.

Our first destination was Nikko. Does the name seem familiar to you? I have now been there 4 times with different people. Every time I go I try to see something new to keep it fresh and so this time we went to some new waterfalls which is near a huuuge lake. Or at least... we would have gone to these places at that time was it not for the humongous traffic jam blocking our entrance. To get into Nikko it's mostly all single lanes and the only way to explain this traffic jam (which appeared to be constant from every direction) would be to say that every single car park was full and cars would only be able to enter Nikko once another has left. SO! We sat in this queue for a while, got bored after a shorter while, stopped for lunch and then gave up and went home. A bit of a depressing way to start our holidays but we conjured up some new plans that night.

Our lonely planet guide recommended we go to a place called 'Matsushima' which apparently has one of the '3 greatest views in Japan'. On the way we thought it'd be nice to stop by a place called 'Aizu' and between each of these places we would stay in a hotel in 'Koriyama' which was about halfway between everything. Got that? Matsushima, Aizu and Koriyama.


The car ride to Aizu took ages, there was another traffic jam that ended mysteriously and it turned out the festival we had planned on attending was in fact the next day. HowEVer we noticed a big castle during our drivings and it's not like you see a castle every day so we investigated that instead. It was a really nice! We spent some time wandering around and seeing stuff and eventually set off to our hotel in Koriyama. I probably don't need to talk much about Koriyama as there's nothing really there. Wikipedia highlights the fact that it's a conurbation which as it turns out (after some research into the definition of the word) is less than what you'd expect for such an interesting sounding word.

The next day we headed up to Matsushima. 'Matsu' means 'Pine' as in Pinetrees and 'Shima' means 'islands'. Islands of pine trees. The weather wasn't really anything to jump for joy about but it gave the islands this eerie, mysterious feel to them. We went on the obligatory boat cruise and saw a fair few of them and they did look quite unique and interesting I think. There was also a botanical park there which was an interesting walk too. It's an interesting place - I'd recommend it.



(above; nikko 1, nikko 2)

The next night was crap town and before we left the next day we decided to give Nikko another shot and we got in this time with little to no effort and saw the shrines and the waterfalls and the lake and some autumn foliage. At this point we were pretty much sick of driving around in my small car so it was a relief to return to Otawara and spread out. The next day I had to work so I did so all that day and the next day we went to Tokyo! Tim wanted to watch the Grandfinal of AFL so we went to a bar in Rippongi that had a special thing going on. Saints lost - that's that really! We all went up the Tokyo tower but to be honest I wasn't exactly sober so I think it passed quicker than I thought...

The next day was sightseeing which was neither here nor there. I'm sorry. I've been typing for ages so I don't want to bore everyone anymore. I worked the next week while the fam traveled to Kyoto and Hiroshima and they came back to my house the next Friday for dinner/sleep and we said goodbye on the Saturday. I'm really glad they came to visit me and although it was a bit trying (you've sort of got to see my car next to my family to get the idea of what we went through) I was tremendously sad to see them go.


So that's that really! They are the experiences had with my family and I'm glad I could fill up my silver week with something worthwhile. I think my family had fun too and I'm happy that now they have seen my situation in Japanistan and that it really isn't half bad! It's pretty darn awesome if I say so! Anyone other visitors?

kris.


P.S. In answer to the choir practice; both of my schools have a cultural festival going on later this month and the PTA are doing a choir thing with the teachers which I was roped into / offered to do. We're singing two songs completely in Japanese and the rehearsal today was the my first time hearing and singing the songs and i don't think it went too bad. I'll write about that day too in the future but I really will try to do some more posts between them.

P.P.S. Do people read this anymore?

Do it Again.

(above; Jun-kun happy about winning something. I forget what)

SO! This page took so long to load that I got a call from my Mother during the process. She's in Narita Airport telling me the family has landed etc. so I'll go to pick them up from a closer location soon. I'll hurl this blog up now and probably write another about my family's adventures together in Japanistan.

For those that weren't aware - my parents, brother and sister are coming to Japan for two weeks! Unfortunately I'm working during this time... but fortunately I have a 6 day holiday, followed by one day of work, followed by a weekend. So I think the plan is for them to stay with me for my holidays and then journey by themselves when I go back to work. I don't really know what the plan is though. Truth be told I had no idea what time they were arriving today until Mum called me just then letting me know to pick them up from Utsunomiya later on.

What I failed to mention last post was that I had another sports day with my bigger school (you may recall a sports day from a while back at my smaller school). I'd like to write a big blog on it but it was quite similar in layout, format etc. so I'll try to condense it all down for your reading pleasure. The games were a little different, I had less to do, I ran in the relay again, we lost again. Phew! What a mouthful.



(from left; opening ceremony; kawanishi/watahiki looking stupid; skipping!)

If I had to, I would say that I had more fun at my first sports day in Ogawa because it's a smaller school and I think the students had more fun... and I think the games were better. I still had fun here though but I often didn't know what to do so I would feel a little awkward at times. It was good to see the students enjoy themselves though. As I said I ran in the teachers relay again - we were going ok at the start but then we had a few slow Mum's slow everyone down, and then a teacher wasn't there to take the baton at one stage so he grabbed an inflatable seal and started running with that instead, and then it somehow became an inflatable dolphin by the end.

Only... none of the games on the day required an inflatable seal or dolphin... so I don't know where they came from.

Other than that it's teaching as per normal which is fine. Now that we've got the speech contests on I've been staying back even later to help out. It's ok but it's getting a little boring for me saying the same words over and over again. I recorded my voice onto a cd for the students to practice with so hopefully I can speak a little less. Prolly not.

So I'll write another joy filled post detailing my families stay. You should probably start getting ready for it now - it'll knock your socks off.

'Till next time!

kris.

Working Hard for the Money

Halfway through my first day back at my smaller school after two days at my bigger school. I can safely say I've forgotten many student names, teachers names, and pretty much what to do in a classroom setting. That is to say - I've forgotten a lot of shit that I shouldn't have.

So as expected, the first lesson is always stilted and wierd but after knocking 3 down in a row I think I'm back on track. We've got a speech contest coming up soon which is the big thing for English (as a subject in Japan... just to clarify) and it involves one student from each year giving a speech on a topic of their choice.

At my big school, the thid year topic is about the giant steep hill before entering the school being used as a metaphor for achieving goals. She uses the word 'maxim' in her speech. She's a pretty smart cookie. I recieved a draft of the first years speech which apparently was created by the teacher and I can't say I was surprised but the English was just awful. In any case, it's something to do I guess. Next up is the special education class that has just one student. Jo-kun is never really a happy camper so its nigh on impossible to teach him anything. yeyyyyyy for ME.

Ah well.

Oh and Sally? Everyone seems to think you're my girlfriend. So uh... lucky you I guess?

kris.