As if we didn't have enough celebrations in February/March...

...my blog is exactly one year old!. Celebrating with bolognese...how about you?

That was the week that was...

This week has had me at an Elementary school (6-11) every day and I love it. It's completely exhausting, playing games with hundreds of excitable tinies, but they make you feel so appreciated. Almost as a postscript to my last entry, this week I've come home with two bags of origami and half a bottle of okonomiyaki sauce.

The students are curious, enthusiastic, optomistic and not beset by the hormonal bugbears that teenagers suffer. My greetings at the start of each lesson are met with a colossal barrage of radiant shouts, preferable by far to the semi-articulate grunts I receive at Junior High.

Even amongst elderly Japanese, gaijin are something of a curiosity. The great thing about meeting very young children, is that you don't have to deal with all the pre-conceptions they've gained by the time they become adults, and their spirit of discovery is still fresh. Topics such as the colour of my eyes, my height or shoe size, the simplest revelations, provoke a classroom sized exclamation of wide eyed incredulity.

One of the best parts about the job is tricking children into learning something by playing games with them. This week for example, I've been teaching directions. First I teach the vocabulary using mime and rudimentary Japanese, then we launch into a game, whereby a blindfolded student has to listen to directions from their friends in order to find a ball and bash it with a stick. Just as much fun as it sounds and incredibly noisy.

I've pondered previously on what happens to these joyous characters to turn them into the little toe-rags I spend most of my time with. One girl in particular, when I first met her, was a model student, motivated, enthusiastic, competent and a delight to work with. Recently, although still pleasant to randomly bump into, she's the very antithesis of the student she was...listen to me, old git.

Moving swiftly on, thanks to everybody who left me a birthday comment. We went out to Tokyo in pursuit of 200 yen beers (£1 roughly, proceed with caution) and a punk night, which was like being back in Hawthornes, but relentlessly good fun, ending in a whimsical with cash taxi trip back to Kawasaki, granting us (well, me, as Hayley was asleep on my knee) the sights of Tokyo at some absurd hour in the morning. The rest of the weekend has been a cosy indoor affair, complete with cake (in the shape of a giant shrimp sushi), senbei and the complete series of Black Adder...Happy Birthday to me indeed...

The Japanese and associated vexations

Differences in culture and means of approaching problems can be frustrating to both native and alien peoples.

Take for example, one of my Japanese teaching colleagues. I like the man, I admire his drive, his intelligence and his bottomless affability. Typically Japanese in those senses, also in the way he expresses dissatisfaction. I suggest something for an upcoming lesson...there is a pause...he eventually says "OK". His features betray nothing of the titanic struggle raging within, only his manner reveals every scrap of him disagreeing. Simply saying "I think not" isn't the Japanese way. He will eventually approach me later with some source to gently state what he's thinking.

Indirectness is an infuriatingly Japanese quirk. If you're asking for anything in a shop, you can be assured that unless your request is greeted with a hearty "Hai!", you know they can't help you...but they don't like saying "no" as a rule. Even though they know that their little search is going to be ultimately futile, they're still going to rush off somewhere, at least with the pretence that they're looking for whatever your request was...I rarely ask for anything in shops now.

Yes, a diatribe...bluntly put, the Japanese annoy the hell out of me on some days. Their indirectness, the racism, the rudeness, their sense of cultural mystique, their utilitarian approach to things and people...on bad days, it's easy to feel like an English speaking object. People will momentarily abduct you in the street to practice their language skills on you. At work, there are times when I'm wheeled in as the human tape recorder, the gaijin pet, the zookeeper entertaining the monkeys.

As is life, it's at these low moments that something happens to slap you around and make you retract your vitriol. The Japanese are capable of the most incredible acts of kindness. Caught short in rainstorms, I have received two umbrellas from strangers in the street. Students have made me origami dinosaur heads, presented me with a charm for my mobile phone. Our landlord consistently feeds us exotic things, and my private student has been known to present us with random high quality foodstuffs. Then, last week, whilst at the Board of Education, I bumped into a former Principal who seemed very keen to make friends with me, despite his English being about as good as my Japanese. I got the impression that he wanted to show me some photos that he had taken whilst working at a Japanese school in Mexico, which he said he'd bring in the next day. So, the day came, and he presented me, not with a photo album, but a book of really amazing photos that he had published. The key word there is "presented". Not only did he give me a truly lovely book, but he signed it in kanji, wrote another variation of my name in kanji, and gave me a mock certificate to say "congratulations, you've been here for almost a year", all written with a brush, giving the characters a wonderfully raw appearance. To cap it all off, I've been invited to his house in the Spring break, where I imagine he's going to teach me a thing or two about sake. One feels quite overwhelmed.

Oops...

With my longest tenure of employment being in a public Library, you'd think I'd have learned a thing or two...assume not, gentle reader. My books were a catastrophic three months overdue, and I'd forgotten my card, rendering me impotent on the borrowing front. My thanks go to the Kawasaki Public Library Service, with their 'no fines' policy.

Ai Rabu Yu

As you'd expect in Japan, Valentines Day has men as the beneficiaries, receiving chocolates or cards, sometimes from admirers, but Office Ladies are generally expected to make a gesture (of respect & appreciation, mind you) towards their boss. But fear not Ladies, for a month later, the 14th of March is White Day, when the boys return the favour & give stuff to the girls...however both days can be viewed with the same cynicism some Westerners reserve for Christmas...especially since it's generally believed that Valentines Day was "imported" in 1958 by a confectionary company, and White Day in 1960 by a marshmallow company (hence the name). Neither day is a national holiday.

This may be something of a rambly entry...I'm unsure as to the role this blog is playing right now (yes, I've finally reached the stage of blogging about blogging)...it's partially a travelogue, a way to let friends know en masse what I'm up to, an excercise in writing...it's not like I've got writers blog (noooooooooo!! [your fault, Obi Wan]), heavens no - I have a whole pantheon of topics to write about, even a proposed trilogy...I guess I'm facing the problem of too much research on a topic swamping what makes it personal, this oft-touted entry on religion being an example. I feel that for a couple of entries I've just been regurgitating facts...and I don't want this blog to become an online diary, cataloguing what we did this or that weekend.






So last weekend we went to an Irish music night in Tokyo - some serious ex-pats present...haven't been around that many non-Japanese since Christmas. Always refreshing to hear a northern accent anywhere in the world. Then, hungover & exhausted, we took a random trip to Shinjuku, arriving by a lucky coincidence to catch the 13th Nippon Festival of Performing Arts (pictured - that man is about to engage in an 80's robot dance...he later ate a balloon for our pleasure).






Photos courtesy of the lovely Hayley. That's taken from the top of Shinjuku Tower - not quite as tall as the Tokyo Metropolitan Building, but it was free and lush. The arrow points to Mount Fuji. Click for biggitude.





Nothing more to say right now, and I've already spent too long trying to decide how to finish...more later...

Better late than never...

In twenty days, my blog is going to be exactly one year old.

I have just this minute fitted in a hit counter.

Looks pathetic doesn't it?

Setsubun

Light of a firefly, snow on windows
Many years of reading, we passed
We found now our years of school finished
This morning, we have to say good-bye
source

Poignant time of year this - the third graders have finished their entry exams, many now knowing which High School they'll be going to, some still aren't so sure. The past few days have seen a few haughty swaggers into the teachers room, and some shattered slouches.

But exam results aren't half of the trauma of leaving school. As I've mentioned before, the Japanese word for friend, tomodachi, has some deep implications. The Elementary and Junior High schools you go to are determined by the area you live in. This means that unless your family has moved at some point in your school life, you are going to have the same classmates for ten years, and you will do pretty much everything with them. Now people who've known each other for almost their entire life go in separate directions. Maybe I'm being soppy...perhaps teaching isn't the career for me if I'm faced with nostalgia every year.

Anyway, loosely connected, tomorrow is the first day of spring, today being the titular Setsubun. On this day when the new season begins, a ceremony called Mamemaki is performed, where toasted soy beans are tossed in and out of houses to the cry of

Fuku wa uchi
Oni wa soto

meaning "good luck in, bad luck (Oni, demons) out". Of the beans one tosses indoors (representing good luck) the number corresponding to your years must be eaten to assure good luck. The beans are toasted in order to kill any demons within. There are apparently many stories that describe the origin of this ritual, all of them ending with an Oni being chased out of a persons house by having beans thrown at them.

I was invited by some first graders observing the custom to their home-room during lunch, and provided with a little origami box of beans to fling out of the window - supremely good fun it was too, although I was concentrating so much on my pronunciation that I very nearly threw the good luck beans out & the bad ones in...oopsy...

One could write endlessly about the apparent contradictions in Japanese society, famed for their super-refined technology, yet carrying out a magical-religious ritual hundreds of years old...I suppose when you think about it, that sort of thing is common in the West (ie, Holy Communion, although Christians may dispute my use of the term "magical"). I think what differentiates the two rituals is attitude towards belief and approach towards ceremony. As their teacher said, she isn't religious, but she observes the custom because it's fun.

That's an outlook on religion I've seen many times since coming here, one I find incredibly interesting. Religion in Japan is an almost shapeless mass of tradition; no Canon, no Scriptures, no attempts to win converts or save the damned - just a recognition of continuity between all things and the need to co-exist in harmony...I'm quite excited by what I've read about Shinto, possibly the very core of what makes them so...well, Japanese...but I'm saving that for another entry...so I'll leave you with an enigmatic ellipsis...