Two Months and Counting

It’s been a long time. I’ve been busy.

I have been in Japan for a little over two months now, and I love it. I am settling in and working to make my apartment the kind of place I want to live for the next two years (yes, I am staying at least two years). The temperature in Akita has plummeted over the past week, so now instead of fans and open windows, I have down comforters and socks. I’m going to order kerosene for my heater (Japan doesn’t believe in central heating) and buy an electric blanket when I force myself to go to Nitori tomorrow. I am also going to spend far too much money on a fancy French press at Starbucks. Pretty much because I can.

I spent the previous week in Bangkok, Thailand, visiting my dear, dear friend and loveliest of travel companions, Kaitlyn. I visited some tourist-y things on my own time – Grand Palace, unbelievably large Reclining Buddha – but mostly we just hung out and got Thai massages and ate street food and drank three chaa nom yens every day. It was a dream, to see my friend from home outside of that setting and to share that foreign setting with her. It was similar to meeting up with Olivia in Paris a year ago. Happily surreal.

The students have just returned from mid-term exams last week and their one day of fall break. Cool biz summer wear is over, so almost all the teachers and students have donned their suit jackets for the more formal winter season. I visited one class today, where I didn’t do much because my JTE was returning exams. In Japan, the students are given a copy of the answer sheet and their exams back, so in addition to the teacher marking the tests, the students also check to make sure the teacher didn’t make any mistakes. One thing I love about the Japanese school system is how much responsibility students are given over their own education. They clean the schools, they double check their exams, they come on weekends and during breaks so they can study and practice club activities. It gives them a lot of pride in their work and in their school, something which is painfully lacking in American schools, I think. It’s colonizing, yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad.
I am also working on learning Japanese myself. A community center in the city offers free classes on Thursday nights, so I have been going to that for the last several weeks, with many of the other city ALT’s. The textbooks are all in kana, which means I re-learned that during one long, unoccupied afternoon in the deserted teacher’s room. Today I printed out a four-page vocabulary list of the verbs I didn’t know, so I can learn those as well. The summer I spent cramming my brain full of Japanese definitely had its strengths, which I see far more now that I am here than I did when it was happening and causing me to dream in nonsensical Japanese vocabulary, but the class structure and textbook definitely lacked in learning the Japanese words for things. We worked with no more than ten verbs for one year’s worth of language. I’m trying to remedy some of that now.

When I am not in class, I hang out in the teacher’s room. If I’m lucky, I have things to mark or worksheets to prepare. But the thing about English is that it’s my native language – which means that it takes me far less time to do the same thing than it takes any of my JTE’s. So I finish stuff quickly and then resume staring into space. Now that I have Japanese textbooks, I study those, because I have free time, and it looks a lot better to be studying language than fiddling with my kaitai (oh, see what I did just there? That’s Japanese for cell phone).

I have thirteen classes this week, I think, at two of my schools. Tally ho!