Back in Japan
Every time I start an update, I can’t get it posted before something else happens that makes whatever I was writing before completely obsolete. When I started writing my post-summer update, I had been back in Japan for 2 weeks. It’s now been a full month, so I’m gonna try for the abridged update, at least to get us up to the most recent points of interest.
Alright, so I spent 5-weeks back in the States for the summer, which pretty much anyone reading this probably already knows. I arrived back in Japan on Friday, August 28th. Of course I had things scheduled already on the 29th and 30th, but I blew them all off in order to relax, because I knew there wouldn’t be much time to relax/recover once that weekend was over. :-)
The 2nd school term of the year started on September 1st, and I’m spending this 2nd term at Tokigawa Junior High School. But on Monday, August 31st, I had to go to my 1st term school, Tamagawa JHS, to technically finish up that term, pack up all my stuff, and make sure the new ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) was securely installed for his first term in Japan. On Tuesday, September 1st, I walked into the newly remodeled Tokigawa JHS (in the pouring rain, because a typhoon was coming in), and felt like I was coming to school for the first time again. The inside of the school looked completely different (as they say in Japan, it was redone in “woody style.” Timber is the main industry of my town….). I wasn’t sure which cubbie-hole I should put my shoes in. The umbrella stand had absconded. 3/4ths of “stuff” had yet to be unpacked after the summer renovation, so besides the boxes of ALT stuff sitting on my desk (packed by last year’s other ALT), we spent at least a week and a half running around asking each other if anyone knew where such-and-such was (like color cartridges for the printer….or my tea mug….), and I had all my stuff from 1st term’s JHS to find a home for. Teacher changes had happened at the start of the new school year in April, so because I had been at “the other JHS” during the 1st term, there were many new faces to get to know in the teachers room, even though the school year was already a third of the way through. There was also a new set of 1st year JHS students who had come up from elementary school while I was at “the other JHS.” While I knew their faces from our elementary school lessons together, this month has been my first chance to really learn their names, which felt kind of backward. J And of course my Thursday elementary school schedule started the same week that the 2nd term started, so I had only 2 days to figure out what elementary school I was going to, what grades I’d be teaching and what topic I should cover when the students are only 2 days back from the summer holiday.
And I would have to say that the 2nd term is arguably the busiest. Only 1-2 weeks into the term, the JHSs have a school festival. Each homeroom prepares a large theme-collage, presentations are prepared for science projects, English speeches, the annual New Zealand exchange trip, art and industrial arts classes, group skit performances, talent show stuff, etc. Elementary schools are busy preparing for the annual school sports festival. The JHS English speech contest is in October, so practice for it begins right away. Each school does a school “marathon,” for which the students practice during the P.E. class. There’s a regional sports tournament in October that all school sports clubs prepare for. 3rd year JHS students have to decide what high school they want to go to, and apparently their grades start to really matter during this term because they are the ones that are reported to the high schools they apply for (I’m really hazy on this detail because it doesn’t completely make sense to me….), and there is a team relay “marathon” race during 2nd term that choice students practice everyday for.
Alrighty. That was just getting back into the swing of things for school. As I mentioned, there is another new ALT in my town (there have been two ALTs in Tokigawa since I arrived, me and a second ALT…this is the 3rd time we’ve had a new 2nd ALT). This year’s newbie is a fresh-out-of-university New Zealander. Since we share a floor/ceiling, car and English classes, there was plenty of coordinating to be done. There are many new ALTs in my prefecture, but the most interesting one to meet was an English guy who had studied for a semester at the University of Wisconsin, which I thought was odd enough, because Wisconsin isn’t that common a destination for international students, but of all the U of W campuses, he had been at the campus in Eau Claire, which is where my mother currently lives, and where I had spent a week over the summer about 3 weeks prior to our meeting. Even better,….while watching an American ALT’s jazz night at a club in a city I very rarely go to, his Japanese wife and I stumbled upon the extreme coincidence of her having attended the community college in my hometown, Fort Dodge, for 2 years AND that she currently works for the Japan program office of a U.S. study abroad provider that I worked with during my years at the International Programs Office at Arizona State University. Wondering if we knew any of the same people in the U.S. office of this study abroad provider, she offered the name Adam….oh, sure, I knew Adam! Amongst other things, I’d actually traveled to Jordan with Adam when his company held a visit opportunity to their campus in Amman. Talk about the small world cliché shining brightly. Very strange, speaking in detail about very prevalent aspects of my U.S. past that I shared in common with a random Japanese woman in a jazz bar in a random city in Japan.
Fall is also High School festival time in Japan. High school festivals are very different from JHS school festivals. They are usually open to the public, have more hands-on activities, music performances, club presentations, etc, that are all going on at the same time (not one after another on a schedule like JHS), and each homeroom gets a budget, comes up with a theme, and decorates their homeroom class accordingly. Themes range from ice cream shops (really selling ice cream) to haunted houses. I went to 2 high school festivals last year and checked that activity attendance off my list (they are great, but at the same time completely overwhelming….the hallways are choc-a-block with students and visitors, the students would do the most aggressive shopkeeper proud as they shout over each other to lure hallway wanderers into their classrooms, even running around the schools with signs, randomly “attacking” people on various floors to get them to visit their classrooms. J). However, I got roped into attending 2 high school festivals this month too. The first was an ALT friend’s high school festival. She was my guide to the jazz club performance later that same night, so we just made a day of it and I found myself back amongst the craziness of the high school school festival. Yikes! Between the school festival and the jazz club, we also managed to fit in a visit (in another town) to a farmers market held outside a fabulous organic shop/restaurant run by an American guy (I think he was American), dinner elsewhere with other area ALTs (almost all of them new), followed by karaoke.
The second high school festival I was asked to attend with the wife and elder daughter of my former supervisor. The eldest daughter had gone to Minnesota over the summer and spent a weekend with my extended family during our annual summer reunion. The eldest daughter was an alum of this particular high school, and the youngest daughter of the family is currently a student at the same high school, in the school’s fashion club, and would be on the runway during the club’s Fashion Show for the school festival. I thought it was very nice of them to contact me again so soon after both the eldest daughter and I returned from the States, and to do something so family-oriented, although I have to admit I was a little dubious about this fashion show. I thought it would be a bunch of completely embarrassed high adolescent girls practically running across a regular stage in random outfits that they threw together with clothes they already owned while the audience sat out in the gym in folding chairs and clapped politely. I have to say, I was VERY impressed in the end! The girls in the club (it’s an all-girls high school anyway) designed and sewed their own clothes, and they didn’t just make a few outfits….they had somewhere between 6-10 different themes for which they made between 5-8 outfits per theme. And knowing how much Japanese girls love cutesy stuff, when the first round of “models” (girls from the club) came out under the “Girlish” theme, I figured we were in for a lot of the same. However, the second theme ended up being a goth/prison/gangster/wild west barmaid-esque theme that completely took me by surprise. Other themes included futuristic, ancient-Japanese-meets-contemporary-Japanese, 4 seasons, sporty, and wedding (which the youngest daughter was a “model” for). They had made their own runway and set up chairs on 3 sides of the runway, just like you see on TV or in magazines, and played different music for each theme’s showings. I’ve never been to a real fashion show, but I imagine it was as close as you can get at high school level without actually being the real thing. I was very impressed, and it was worth going to the festival for the fashion show alone….although I did enjoy seeing the dance club, choir and orchestra all perform as well.
The first two Sundays of September were spent respectively with a family I know from Chiba (north of Tokyo, just at the Tokyo Disneyland site) helping both the mother and the eldest son prepare for a town English speech contest, and with the Vice Principal and lunch lady of one of my elementary schools shopping and eating in Yokohama (a major harbor city just west of Tokyo along the coast). I’m still not quite sure how the latter happened, but it was tons of fun. Both ladies are very generous, patient and motherly, so inspite of the fact that they speak next to no English and my Japanese is crap, we had a great time.
During the weekdays, I’ve started back up with town hall soft volleyball practices, dance aerobics class and my Japanese classes. Of course every weekend I make my visit to the local organic shop/café, Poponoki, for grocery shopping. I attended my 2nd Japanese wedding on the 19th, which just so happened to be in Yokohama (but I’ll have to write more about that in another blog, considering I haven’t written about my 1st Japanese wedding experience yet either). I was supposed to leave the same night as the wedding on an overnight boat for a set of islands south of Tokyo called the Izu Islands, where another ALT friend of mine lives and works (also from Iowa), but there was another typhoon coming in and they cancelled the boats for that night. I couldn’t make it all the way back to my town from Yokohama after the wedding before the trains ended, so I called in a slumber-party favor with a friend living halfway inbetween (who was going with me to the Izu Islands anyway). Instead of arriving on the Izu Islands on the 20th as originally planned, we went to a dragon flower festival (which was completely amazing as you’ll see if I get photos posted). That same afternoon, when the island friend was able to confirm that the boats would run that night, we headed to the port, caught the boat, and spent the 21st-23rd on an island called Kozu-shima, where our mutual friend lives. The 21st-23rd all happened to be national holidays. :-) Yay. :-) And I’m pretty well pooped from writing this blog, so more about Kozu-shima in the next installment!
P.S. Another weekend has past since I wrote the above....Friday night, late English speech contest practice followed by aerobics class. Saturday, watching Kabuki plays in Ginza (Tokyo), headed to the Indian Festival in Yoyogi Park after (also in Tokyo), couldn't make the last train back to my town (cuz it's at 9:30pm...ridiculous), so once again had to stay at a friend's (thank goodness for well-located friends, ay?!). Sunday, took 3 hours to get home by train what wound have probably taken 20 minutes by car, because on my last change-over, I had to wait an hour and a half for the train back to my town; went to Poponoki; cleaned; rode my bike back to the train station to head back to the town where I had to wait an hour and a half for my train home just hours before to have a "conversation lesson," however, found out when I got to the train station that the bike "parking lot" building is closed on Sunday (ironically, this is the first time I tried to use that building). Apparently if you live in Tokigawa you're just not supposed to want to leave on Sundays. Luckily, the lady who owns the convenience store across the street from the train station (who studied in the States for 4 years during university and speaks perfect English) was wandering around outside her store, so I was able to ask her if I could store my bike somewhere around her shop. She let me put it in the courtyard area between the shop and her house. When I came back, it was raining a bit, and she had put an umbrella over the handlebars and seat, and left me a note letting me know that I could take the umbrella if I needed to, and didn't have to return it! It's nice when a crazy days ends on an unexpected random act of kindness. :-)
Alright, so I spent 5-weeks back in the States for the summer, which pretty much anyone reading this probably already knows. I arrived back in Japan on Friday, August 28th. Of course I had things scheduled already on the 29th and 30th, but I blew them all off in order to relax, because I knew there wouldn’t be much time to relax/recover once that weekend was over. :-)
The 2nd school term of the year started on September 1st, and I’m spending this 2nd term at Tokigawa Junior High School. But on Monday, August 31st, I had to go to my 1st term school, Tamagawa JHS, to technically finish up that term, pack up all my stuff, and make sure the new ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) was securely installed for his first term in Japan. On Tuesday, September 1st, I walked into the newly remodeled Tokigawa JHS (in the pouring rain, because a typhoon was coming in), and felt like I was coming to school for the first time again. The inside of the school looked completely different (as they say in Japan, it was redone in “woody style.” Timber is the main industry of my town….). I wasn’t sure which cubbie-hole I should put my shoes in. The umbrella stand had absconded. 3/4ths of “stuff” had yet to be unpacked after the summer renovation, so besides the boxes of ALT stuff sitting on my desk (packed by last year’s other ALT), we spent at least a week and a half running around asking each other if anyone knew where such-and-such was (like color cartridges for the printer….or my tea mug….), and I had all my stuff from 1st term’s JHS to find a home for. Teacher changes had happened at the start of the new school year in April, so because I had been at “the other JHS” during the 1st term, there were many new faces to get to know in the teachers room, even though the school year was already a third of the way through. There was also a new set of 1st year JHS students who had come up from elementary school while I was at “the other JHS.” While I knew their faces from our elementary school lessons together, this month has been my first chance to really learn their names, which felt kind of backward. J And of course my Thursday elementary school schedule started the same week that the 2nd term started, so I had only 2 days to figure out what elementary school I was going to, what grades I’d be teaching and what topic I should cover when the students are only 2 days back from the summer holiday.
And I would have to say that the 2nd term is arguably the busiest. Only 1-2 weeks into the term, the JHSs have a school festival. Each homeroom prepares a large theme-collage, presentations are prepared for science projects, English speeches, the annual New Zealand exchange trip, art and industrial arts classes, group skit performances, talent show stuff, etc. Elementary schools are busy preparing for the annual school sports festival. The JHS English speech contest is in October, so practice for it begins right away. Each school does a school “marathon,” for which the students practice during the P.E. class. There’s a regional sports tournament in October that all school sports clubs prepare for. 3rd year JHS students have to decide what high school they want to go to, and apparently their grades start to really matter during this term because they are the ones that are reported to the high schools they apply for (I’m really hazy on this detail because it doesn’t completely make sense to me….), and there is a team relay “marathon” race during 2nd term that choice students practice everyday for.
Alrighty. That was just getting back into the swing of things for school. As I mentioned, there is another new ALT in my town (there have been two ALTs in Tokigawa since I arrived, me and a second ALT…this is the 3rd time we’ve had a new 2nd ALT). This year’s newbie is a fresh-out-of-university New Zealander. Since we share a floor/ceiling, car and English classes, there was plenty of coordinating to be done. There are many new ALTs in my prefecture, but the most interesting one to meet was an English guy who had studied for a semester at the University of Wisconsin, which I thought was odd enough, because Wisconsin isn’t that common a destination for international students, but of all the U of W campuses, he had been at the campus in Eau Claire, which is where my mother currently lives, and where I had spent a week over the summer about 3 weeks prior to our meeting. Even better,….while watching an American ALT’s jazz night at a club in a city I very rarely go to, his Japanese wife and I stumbled upon the extreme coincidence of her having attended the community college in my hometown, Fort Dodge, for 2 years AND that she currently works for the Japan program office of a U.S. study abroad provider that I worked with during my years at the International Programs Office at Arizona State University. Wondering if we knew any of the same people in the U.S. office of this study abroad provider, she offered the name Adam….oh, sure, I knew Adam! Amongst other things, I’d actually traveled to Jordan with Adam when his company held a visit opportunity to their campus in Amman. Talk about the small world cliché shining brightly. Very strange, speaking in detail about very prevalent aspects of my U.S. past that I shared in common with a random Japanese woman in a jazz bar in a random city in Japan.
Fall is also High School festival time in Japan. High school festivals are very different from JHS school festivals. They are usually open to the public, have more hands-on activities, music performances, club presentations, etc, that are all going on at the same time (not one after another on a schedule like JHS), and each homeroom gets a budget, comes up with a theme, and decorates their homeroom class accordingly. Themes range from ice cream shops (really selling ice cream) to haunted houses. I went to 2 high school festivals last year and checked that activity attendance off my list (they are great, but at the same time completely overwhelming….the hallways are choc-a-block with students and visitors, the students would do the most aggressive shopkeeper proud as they shout over each other to lure hallway wanderers into their classrooms, even running around the schools with signs, randomly “attacking” people on various floors to get them to visit their classrooms. J). However, I got roped into attending 2 high school festivals this month too. The first was an ALT friend’s high school festival. She was my guide to the jazz club performance later that same night, so we just made a day of it and I found myself back amongst the craziness of the high school school festival. Yikes! Between the school festival and the jazz club, we also managed to fit in a visit (in another town) to a farmers market held outside a fabulous organic shop/restaurant run by an American guy (I think he was American), dinner elsewhere with other area ALTs (almost all of them new), followed by karaoke.
The second high school festival I was asked to attend with the wife and elder daughter of my former supervisor. The eldest daughter had gone to Minnesota over the summer and spent a weekend with my extended family during our annual summer reunion. The eldest daughter was an alum of this particular high school, and the youngest daughter of the family is currently a student at the same high school, in the school’s fashion club, and would be on the runway during the club’s Fashion Show for the school festival. I thought it was very nice of them to contact me again so soon after both the eldest daughter and I returned from the States, and to do something so family-oriented, although I have to admit I was a little dubious about this fashion show. I thought it would be a bunch of completely embarrassed high adolescent girls practically running across a regular stage in random outfits that they threw together with clothes they already owned while the audience sat out in the gym in folding chairs and clapped politely. I have to say, I was VERY impressed in the end! The girls in the club (it’s an all-girls high school anyway) designed and sewed their own clothes, and they didn’t just make a few outfits….they had somewhere between 6-10 different themes for which they made between 5-8 outfits per theme. And knowing how much Japanese girls love cutesy stuff, when the first round of “models” (girls from the club) came out under the “Girlish” theme, I figured we were in for a lot of the same. However, the second theme ended up being a goth/prison/gangster/wild west barmaid-esque theme that completely took me by surprise. Other themes included futuristic, ancient-Japanese-meets-contemporary-Japanese, 4 seasons, sporty, and wedding (which the youngest daughter was a “model” for). They had made their own runway and set up chairs on 3 sides of the runway, just like you see on TV or in magazines, and played different music for each theme’s showings. I’ve never been to a real fashion show, but I imagine it was as close as you can get at high school level without actually being the real thing. I was very impressed, and it was worth going to the festival for the fashion show alone….although I did enjoy seeing the dance club, choir and orchestra all perform as well.
The first two Sundays of September were spent respectively with a family I know from Chiba (north of Tokyo, just at the Tokyo Disneyland site) helping both the mother and the eldest son prepare for a town English speech contest, and with the Vice Principal and lunch lady of one of my elementary schools shopping and eating in Yokohama (a major harbor city just west of Tokyo along the coast). I’m still not quite sure how the latter happened, but it was tons of fun. Both ladies are very generous, patient and motherly, so inspite of the fact that they speak next to no English and my Japanese is crap, we had a great time.
During the weekdays, I’ve started back up with town hall soft volleyball practices, dance aerobics class and my Japanese classes. Of course every weekend I make my visit to the local organic shop/café, Poponoki, for grocery shopping. I attended my 2nd Japanese wedding on the 19th, which just so happened to be in Yokohama (but I’ll have to write more about that in another blog, considering I haven’t written about my 1st Japanese wedding experience yet either). I was supposed to leave the same night as the wedding on an overnight boat for a set of islands south of Tokyo called the Izu Islands, where another ALT friend of mine lives and works (also from Iowa), but there was another typhoon coming in and they cancelled the boats for that night. I couldn’t make it all the way back to my town from Yokohama after the wedding before the trains ended, so I called in a slumber-party favor with a friend living halfway inbetween (who was going with me to the Izu Islands anyway). Instead of arriving on the Izu Islands on the 20th as originally planned, we went to a dragon flower festival (which was completely amazing as you’ll see if I get photos posted). That same afternoon, when the island friend was able to confirm that the boats would run that night, we headed to the port, caught the boat, and spent the 21st-23rd on an island called Kozu-shima, where our mutual friend lives. The 21st-23rd all happened to be national holidays. :-) Yay. :-) And I’m pretty well pooped from writing this blog, so more about Kozu-shima in the next installment!
P.S. Another weekend has past since I wrote the above....Friday night, late English speech contest practice followed by aerobics class. Saturday, watching Kabuki plays in Ginza (Tokyo), headed to the Indian Festival in Yoyogi Park after (also in Tokyo), couldn't make the last train back to my town (cuz it's at 9:30pm...ridiculous), so once again had to stay at a friend's (thank goodness for well-located friends, ay?!). Sunday, took 3 hours to get home by train what wound have probably taken 20 minutes by car, because on my last change-over, I had to wait an hour and a half for the train back to my town; went to Poponoki; cleaned; rode my bike back to the train station to head back to the town where I had to wait an hour and a half for my train home just hours before to have a "conversation lesson," however, found out when I got to the train station that the bike "parking lot" building is closed on Sunday (ironically, this is the first time I tried to use that building). Apparently if you live in Tokigawa you're just not supposed to want to leave on Sundays. Luckily, the lady who owns the convenience store across the street from the train station (who studied in the States for 4 years during university and speaks perfect English) was wandering around outside her store, so I was able to ask her if I could store my bike somewhere around her shop. She let me put it in the courtyard area between the shop and her house. When I came back, it was raining a bit, and she had put an umbrella over the handlebars and seat, and left me a note letting me know that I could take the umbrella if I needed to, and didn't have to return it! It's nice when a crazy days ends on an unexpected random act of kindness. :-)
posted by Mandy | 9:46 PM
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