You Are Important

This is the single most incredible piece of cultural insight I have had since arriving in Japan.

A few weeks ago, I had a class with some san-nensei (3rd year) students.  My teacher wanted me to talk about cultural differences between America and Japan that I had noticed.  I got into a part where I was trying to describe the greater centrality of the individual in America, and the way people insist on their rights or viewpoints.  I was trying to describe this in English they could understand, and as I was finishing my teacher started writing on the board.

He said one sentence I said had jumped out at him.  I looked at what he had written.  It was "I am important".  I had used that as something an American person might think as opposed to the possible Japanese thought "We are important".  Pretty broad strokes here because of language, but more or less what I wanted to say.  My teacher smiled at me.

"I am fifty years old.  I have never heard or seen this sentence, in English or Japanese."

My brain shorted out a little.  This particular teacher has exceptional English, is interested in theater, and very interested in multi-culturalism.  Still, the fact remained that he essentially never even conceived of the idea of the sentence "I am important".

I think American, and probably most Western, kids grow up with this idea all around them.  I consider it a mark of good parenting if your child believes this about themselves, and I do believe it of myself.  I don't know that I would go around saying it out loud, but I do feel it to be true, in perhaps a more complex way than the simple thought would suggest.

Mr. Kondo (the teacher) turned to the class.  "What do you think about a person who would say this?  Do you like this person?  Raise your hand if you would like this person."  Not a hand went up.  Mr. Kondo repeated the question in Japanese to make sure.  Still no hands.  "Would you dislike this person?  Raise your hands."  Almost every hand was raised.

I tried to explain a bit more completely, even working in a grammar point review to say that Americans think it's bad to think "I am MORE important THAN YOU".  I believe the kids understood, and I don't think they think I'm an arrogant asshole, but nevertheless, it was striking.  I talked to Mr. Kondo some more after class.  He said he thought it would be good for more Japanese children to grow up thinking "I am important".  I agreed.

The class taught me something so important about cultural differences.  These kids didn't have every possible line of cultural thought in front of them to choose from, they only had their own.  So, while an American child might be thought of as having low self-esteem if they didn't think they were important, these Japanese children didn't even consider that such a thought existed.  Their thinking about society and their place in it originates from an entirely different place.

Now, I'm still being rather blunt about this point.  I'm sure there are many Japanese people who consider themselves to be important in the same way that Americans do, and there is a ton of wiggle room in any cultural discussion/theory.  However, I see the impact and effect of it more and more in my students as I learn more about them.  They believe passionately in school events, their community, their clubs.  They are often shy about asserting themselves or putting themselves in front of a group, but work together very well.  Originality is sometimes lacking, but performance is usually very high.

There's no objectively right answer to this question, but I'd be curious to hear what all you Westerners think.  Do you believe a person should feel important as an individual?  Clearly, I expect there to be a pretty strong consensus in a certain direction given the people I'm asking, but still.  I also defined "I am important" in a later conversation as "I have a place in the world and something to offer it".

In any case, if you are reading this, I think you are important.  Be honest and speak your mind clearly, wherever you are.  It matters.

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School Life (The Nerdy Side of C.O.G.)

Finally got around to this one.  Hopefully it provides a more rounded view of what I do here day to day, along with some gee-whiz-they-do-different-things-than-we-do moments.

School in Japan is a much more all-consuming part of a kid's life than it is in America.  I leave at 4:00 most days, but many of the students stay long after me, until 6:00 or 7:00, with club activities every day.  They come in on most weekends as well.  Also, with a summer break of only a month, school is close to year-round.  My classes have been pretty floored when I tell them American kids get three months off for summer break.

The teachers also stay at school incredibly late, often to 7:00 or later even if they're not running a club activity (in fact, the kids often run clubs and sports practices by themselves).  To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what they're working on; I've heard from other JETs that they have to deal with a ton of possibly unnecessary administrative work.

The office.

A big change that I had to get used to was that there is one large teacher's office, and the teachers move between classes instead of having their own classroom.  The kids remain in the same room for the most part, except for specialty classes like art or music.  While there is a secretary's office, there is no front desk--this means that insurance salesmen and other solicitors can just walk right into the office and leave their advertising materials for teachers.

The salesmen, of course, walk around in small borrowed slippers.  You have to remove your shoes to go into most buildings in Japan.  I have a cubby and a special set of work shoes that I change into every day, and the kids have the same (in fact, they all have the exact same brand of shoe to go along with their uniforms).

I work exclusively in a team-teaching situation.  That is to say, I am never in class without a JTE (Japanese Teacher of English (this is the acronym used by the JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching) program; while it's a little awkward sounding, the alternative is Japanese English Teacher, which of course would be...JET. (The Japanese overuse acronyms as much as I overuse parentheticals))).  In high school, other JETs have more autonomy, which I often wish I had.  Junior high English classes are taught mostly from the textbook and focus primarily on rote memorization and dialogue recitation.

This is a huge problem I have with the junior high English curriculum, which is nationwide.  When I ask my kids "How are you?", they all answer "I'm fine thank you, how are you?" in a clipped, incorrectly inflected way.  It's pretty clear they often just know the sounds and not the meaning of the words.  They are taught to expect one correct answer to every question, which is a terrible way to learn a language.  I don't know enough about America's public middle school language curriculum to make an educated comparison, but this system is less than ideal.

Every JET's experience over here is different, just as every area and school is different.  Some people have 20 schools in rural areas that they have to bus to, only seeing a school every couple months, while some have one school that they devote all their time to.  I have two schools, and I move between them on a roughly month-long block rotation.  I teach three or four 50 minute classes a day out of twenty classes over three grades.  This means I never see a class more often than once a week.

My desk, with "Sweet Home Chicago" lyrics and guitar close at hand.

I always have to work whatever I want to do into the JTE's lesson plan.  They arrive at my desk with an idea (or I go to them) and ask me to fill a certain amount of time, which can vary widely from teacher to teacher.  I am usually in charge of finding a fun activity to do or something otherwise different from the strict grammar instruction.  Sometimes I think of something on my own, and sometimes I search online for activities.  Sometimes I am just used as a tape recorder, the JTE prompting me to repeat words and phrases for a native accent demonstration.  Those are my least favorite classes, but luckily there haven't been many of them.

Like every school, every teacher is different, and it's been an interesting experience getting to know the 11 different teachers from my two schools.  Communicating with them is sometimes difficult, because of both English level (much lower than I expected in some cases) and cultural differences.  As the Japanese tend to state intent and problems indirectly, it's hard to know what they expect of me.  Mostly it's been trial and error.

Usually, the first class with each group of kids is a self-introduction lesson which I came up with over the summer.  I printed off lots of pictures from home, brought in my Colorado flag and a map of the US, and I walk them through a little bit of my life.  Over time, I worked out a way to get some English practice in along with the cultural stuff.  For instance, after showing pictures of my family, I had them repeat "Mother" and "Father" and then I worked on pronouncing the "th" sound.  I did this by sticking out my tongue and biting it to emphasize what your mouth does with the sound, then trying them to do the same.  Trying to get a full class of Japanese kids to stick out their tongues was often one of the hardest parts of my lessons.

Japanese students are, by and large, much more shy than American students.  This is problematic for language learning, as it's difficult to figure out what they know if they don't speak.  Often I've discovered they know a grammar point very well, but completely clam up when I ask them about it.  One of the ways I tried to get everyone loose was to teach them a song.  At the end of my self-introduction, I taught them the chorus to "Sweet Home Chicago" after explaining that I went to Chicago for university and that I play guitar.  Some classes had a hard time, but some got really into it as I played and sang along.  I'm going to try to do a lot of teaching through songs, as my experience learning and teaching French at camp taught me how effective that can be.

The kids also tend to be scared of being original, in my experience.  It's possible that this is just a function of them being middle schoolers, but I think it's more pronounced here.  For instance, to review "-er than" and "the -est", I had them draw their own superhero or monster and give it an age and a height, then told them to compare with other students' superheroes and write comparative sentences.  Many kids just didn't get it when I told them to draw their OWN superhero, not Pikachu or Doraemon or Anpanman (all anime characters).  Even a couple of the JTEs had trouble with the concept.  I also tried a Mad Libs activity to practice a dialogue sample and to illustrate sentence structure that the kids eventually enjoyed but had a really hard time with at first.  For instance, to demonstrate what a noun was, I wrote things like "school, bike, ocean" on the board.  The JTE explained in Japanese, but still many kids wrote down "school" or "bike" or "ocean" in the blank instead of their own word.  I hope I can stretch their minds a bit in this way while I'm here.

I think the way I'm having the biggest influence is talking to the kids outside of class and just being a big tall white guy that doesn't speak Japanese.  A lot of my educational power right now comes from my novelty, so I may adjust some of what I do as the kids (and teachers) get more used to me, and I to them, as the year goes on.

I hope this serves as a good start to understanding some of the differences here.  Please let me know if you have more specific questions or comments--sometimes it's difficult for me to know what will be the most interesting to people back home, I hope we can keep up a conversation of sorts.

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Geisha District Light Up

Last Friday (October 9th) some of us went to a "light-up" in one of Kanazawa's Geisha districts.  It was fairly understated, but beautiful, with laterns lighting the paths of a centuries-old neighborhood.  We managed to see two live music performances and have some tea in an old tea house.  Kanazawa is pretty amazing in that there are cultural events going on every weekend almost every day if you look for them.  Here are a few pictures of the night.

 

 This was not the famous traditional tea ceremony--it was still ceremonial, but very abbreviated.

 

 

 

Pre-violin and cello performance.

In celebration of Blogger being up and running again and having added an "Extra Large" picture option, here's a pretty stunning picture from a bridge in downtown Kanazawa from a week ago.

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Coming Soon

I have been much distracted by goings on this week, but I will have a couple good posts coming soon, I promise.  One problem is that there is something going wrong with the Blogger editing software for me, everything's all out of sorts.  If anyone has ideas for how to fix it or if you have seen problems elsewhere, let me know.

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Typhoon Melor - Dispatches from the Ground

Typhoon Melor is going to make landfall and sweep across Japan tomorrow, and I couldn't be more excited.  This is my first experience with a typhoon or tropical storm, and hopefully it'll just be intense and impressive and no one will get hurt.

All junior high school and elementary school classes across my whole prefecture are canceled as well as most high school classes.  BUT.  All teachers still have to come in to work.  This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.  I don't know what they expect us to do with a whole extra day, and depending on the severity of the typhoon it could be dangerous, especially for the teachers who drive.  If we want to stay at home we have to take a vacation day.  This is like a school having a snow day except for the teachers.  Sure, cultures are different, blah blah.  This is dumb.

Anyway, thus it will come to pass that I will walk to school during the height of the storm and spend all day there.  Since I will have almost literally nothing to do, I'm going to try to live-blog the typhoon with any pictures I can get.  If I'm not able to get onto blogger.com at work, I'll just do a diary and post it later.

Here's a picture from my apartment balcony at 5:15 PM--storm's a-brewin'.  However, something really interesting is that the clouds are all moving towards where the typhoon is coming from.  I guess they get sucked into the whirl of the storm system even from this far out.  Rad.  See you soon!

Thursday, 9:12 AM - The typhoon has been severly underwhelming so far.  A fair amount of rain and swollen rivers, but not much wind or awe-inspiring destruction.  It's business as usual in the office minus the kids.  They canceled the regular school lunch without telling me, so I had to order out for food.

Thursday, 10:10 AM - We have a TV on, and it looks like there is some wind and damage in other parts of the country, but not a lot.  I don't even speak Japanese and I can tell they're reaching for this news...

Thursday, 11:19 AM - It's slowed to a sprinkle here.  Little wind.  Lamest typhoon ever.  I heard that there was one fatality in Aichi prefecture, but I honestly don't see how.  Everyone has officially freaked out about nothing.

From the walk to work this morning.

 

Oh, carry me away, raging river... 

 

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How To Get Outscored 28-1 And Still Win A Soccer Tournament

Something crazy like 90% of the population of Japan lives on 20% of the land because of how steep and densely forested the terrain is.  I might even be understating that statistic.  It's always worth remembering that a third of the population of the US lives in an area essentially 1/5 the size of California.

What this means, besides amazing population density in the city centers, is that there are still enormous areas of the country with nothing but mountains and trees.  The leaves are starting to change here, and the forests are lush and full even higher up.  Highways rise off the seaside in minutes and burrow through hills for half-hour stretches in intermittent tunnels and hug the cliffsides of mountains without a building to be seen.  It's nice to know that there's still so much of the country that remains that way, even if it's not by choice.

Posing for a sleeping shot with the Ishikawa Football Club mascot Sashimi.  He was a great cuddler.

42 Ishikawa Prefecture JETs headed up to Nagano, more than half that number being supporters for our team.  No one else brought close to that many people.  The home of the 1998 Winter Olympics is about three and a half hours from Kanazawa, so we divided up the cars and road-tripped up to play against 15 other teams over the two day tournament.

I'm not sure how long this tournament has been going on, but it's been a while.  Our team got together for three practices over the last month, and we were excited to get out and have some fun running around and competing.  What most of us were unaware of was that most of the "JET" teams are stacked with non-JET players, either ex-JETs who've been playing in local leagues for years or worse, Japanese and Brazilian (!) friends of JETs.  One of the Japanese guys I met at the party on Saturday night from the Chiba team plays for the national amateur soccer league.

So yeah...we got spanked.  It seems pretty silly to me to stack your team like that to try to win a for-fun soccer tournament, but the rules be the rules.  We responded by playing our hearts out while our supporters screamed and chanted so loudly they could be heard three fields away.  And when the party came around, we danced longer and laughed louder than anyone else.  I'll lose every recreational sports league game I play for the rest of my life if I can be on a team like that every time.

The scores of the games on Saturday went 8-0, 8-0, 9-1, and our seeding determined that we had to play the second team in single elimination on Sunday.  We played them much harder, and the score only ended up at 3-0.  Smiles all around.

Rainy and cold to start the day on Saturday.

 

I decided to climb ski lift poles on my lunch break.

 

The highest soccer fields in the whole country.

 

 

Sashimi gets a whirl on the dancefloor.

The whole Ishikawa FC, felt letters and pom-poms galore.

We also got some great sightseeing in on Sunday on the way out.  The mountains in Japan can be absolutely stunning the way they erupt out of completely flat valleys into several-thousand foot peaks.  It was hazy and my camera was in the trunk, so no pictures of some of the most dramatic views, but there's another tournament in the spring in the same place, so I'll grab some after we practice all winter and take Nagano by storm.  (So check back in 6 months...?)

Sometime in the next couple days I'll have another post with some more specifics about school and the work I'm doing here.  Along with that, I'll share with you the most amazing cultural revelation I've had yet.

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Nagano Preamble

Here with the promised Sunday night/morning post.  I'm more sore than I can remember being in a long time, sunburnt, and exhausted, so I won't get to the full post tonight.  I'm also going to try to get some pictures from other people that I wasn't able to take, so look for the extended version in the next couple days.  Here's a taste, though:

 

 

 

The pictures won't be able to convey how surprisingly, staggeringly beautiful Nagano and the surrounding area are in the fall, but maybe I can augment that with some words and your imagination.

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