Rumor Has It You Ain't Got Her Love Anymore

I am sitting in the teacher’s room after school. A few students absently clean the area around me, occasionally exchanging solemn whispers. Everything is peaceful. Then, one of my favorite ninenseis boys comes bounding in and plops violently in the chair next me.


“Jeshii,” he says, “My girlfriend…Divorce!”

Divorce?

Through a series of questions, I learn that although he and his girlfriend had not broken up yet, there was a rumor going around school which he had heard from a few other people that his girlfriend intended to break up with him.

Do you want to break up?, I ask.

Well, I love her, buuuutttt....maybe she does not love me, he says.

Have you talked to her?

No.

Are you going to talk to her?

No, no, no…, and he looks at me like this is a ridiculous suggestion.

I laugh. So you are just going to wait and see?

Yes!

He then bounds out of the teacher’s room in the same manner in which he had entered, the sole purpose of his visit being to tell me about his love life, and I realize…that I am in the know, in the school gossip circle! They now tell me things, rumors, about their lives!

I also realize how much high school really is the same everywhere.



Author’s note: A few weeks later it was reported to me that they had in fact not broken up, and as far as I know, are still together. I asked him if he thought it was "rabu rabu" forever. He thinks maybe not. Ah well.

Korea and My Grandfather

I recently read an article, and it got me thinking. Here’s the link if you’re interested in where this all started:


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=157396344

I also, a little less recently, visited South Korea for the first time. I didn’t think about it much during my stay, but that trip was the first time anyone in my family has been to Korea since my grandfather was in the war there in the 50’s. Presumably, my trip was only the second time anyone in my immediate family has ever been to Korea.

Obviously, Seoul is a very different place now from when my grandfather drove ambulances during the war. Obviously, he wasn’t there as a tourist. I remember when my grandmother died, and as we were going through all the many, many things in her house, we found a trunk of souvenirs my grandfather had brought back from that tour – I want to say there was a jacket, but I could be remembering that part incorrectly. Mostly, I remember the silk scarves printed with famous Korean scenes on them. They seemed paralyzed into the creases and folds the years they had spent buried in that truck, with no one looking at them, had put them in. I was eleven when I saw them, and even then I realized how little I knew about the places my grandparents had seen on the trips their kids, my dad and aunt and uncles, hadn’t gone on and therefore couldn’t tell me about. I wanted to know about the Korea he had seen.

I also remember a photograph of my grandfather positioned in the front seat of one of those ambulances, knees drawn up because he was very tall, wearing his uniform. It was a beautiful picture, and I remember looking at the trees in the background behind the ambulance, visible through the windows of the drivers’ cockpit.

Thinking back on what I saw of Korea myself, I can imagine that photograph superimposed over the scenes I witnessed. Even in the city there are patches that seem quite rural, and there are such trees there even now. Did he visit the Secret Garden while he was there? I did – but I don’t know how much our experiences overlap, even sixty years apart, if they do at all. A soldier then and a teacher now, sharing even a little of the same experience. That I, eleven years after being eleven and looking at those old trifles in a chest, would go there myself. I wouldn’t have thought it. I would have liked to talk to him about it, to share.

So even though he wasn’t buried on Korean soil, his gravestone has the mark of his war – like all the gravestones in that cemetery do, a cemetery for veterans. I had never thought much of the fact my grandfather was a veteran. Because I hadn’t needed to. He died when I was eight, and his war experience was far removed by both time and space from when I was part of his experience, singing songs in a rocking chair, not thinking about death. But, now, having been there and having a better understanding of the nature of that war and the nature of war in general, I wish he and I could have talked about it – for him to see it then and me to see it now, and across all those years between our times and between the last time I saw him and now, he is still an intrinsic part of my experience – an experience I am only partly alone in.

In the article I link to above, families talk about going to a certain cemetery in Korea because their family members had died in the war. Mostly, these families are Chinese. In a way, I understand that sentiment – a connection to someone gone and far away, someone you still love and wish you knew more about, and their intrinsic connection to a place far away. So my Korea is just that, also my grandfather’s. My visit there was more than just a weekend – it was a red thread around a finger sixty years old, to always remember and to never forget.

Kids Say The Darndest Things : Part 2

These are more quotes from student essays that have come through my desk. Each quote is from a different essay by a different student, and original syntax and spelling have been maintained for the sake of authenticity.



On Love:

• “Love is danger word…”


On Staying Healthy:

• “[I do] Nothing. Is it about time I should worry about health? On the contrary, what about you?”


On Population Control:

• “In order to improve environment, I want to reduce number of people. If it falls down to half, we’ll use less electricity, fossil fuels, and so on. So I’m not going to get married in the future.”


On Forms of Words that Should Exist But Don’t:

• “No I amn’t.”

• “So it should be compulsory to learn English early…so we can learn it easilier.”

• “In terms of health, what importantest in food a day is breakfast.”


On Future Plans:

• “He wants to be farmer. His dream is to get married to a woman of matchless beauty.”

• “He has no hope for the future.”

• “She want to go to a college to learn education. She want to be a elementary school teacher because she likes children. Also, her dream is to marry. She will do her best.”

• “Her dream is an intercultural marriage.”


On How to Carry Large Pieces of Fruit:

• “A furoshiki is a one piece of square cloth. It’s very useful and environment-friendly. It’s up to your imagination how we use it. For example, we can wrap and bring a watermelon with it easier.”


On Hanafuda:

• “Hanafuda is one of Japanese game using cards with flower designs. There are twelve kinds of flowers that represent the twelve months of year. It’s like a nervous breakdown of cards in Europe.

The rule is very simple. So why don’t you play once?”


On False Impressions:

• “My brain works very actively. And my brain is very useful for studying. But I don’t use my perfect brain. So I am often said that Mr. Mizunoe is very fool. I think that I am a genius boy. So I want to say that I don’t use the all brain. I use a portion of my perfect brain. This is very mottainai. You had better not try to fool me.”


On Why You Might Bike Instead of Drive:

• “First, if he goes to his office slowly with a bike [instead of car], he can look around him. It makes him some exciting discoveries, so he likes it.

Second, he was swindled out of his money under a false promise of marriage. So he doesn’t have enough money.”


On Travel:

• “I want to go to Europe because rowing sports come from there…And also, I want to have real Italians.”

• “Reckless adventures ruin you.”

My Eco-Friendly Year : Trains

Last week marked the end of my nearly 400 days without a car. It was a day that should have come about 400 days earlier.

Before I came to Japan, I had visions of riding trains everywhere I needed to go, of the convenience of them all, of me with my nose buried in a book while scenic green rice fields rolled past in the background, surrounded by students and businessmen so plugged in they wouldn’t notice me stealing surreptitious glances in their respective directions.

But then I came to Japan.

And I realized that this romantic vision of train-as-primary-transportation really doesn’t work in reality, because the reality is that trains don’t drop you off in front of where you want to go. They take you to areas, towns, but not specific locations. Even if I took the train, I would still have to walk, bike, or bus to where I actually want to go, and, besides maybe a lovely ten-minute walk beside a river in the balmy autumn air, which never actually happened in reality either, these methods of completing journeys are not romantic and are not convenient and really just cancel out whatever enjoyment I may have gotten from the train ride itself. On which I never actually read a book anyway because there was too high a chance of me getting distracted and then missing my stop, and they don’t run often enough in my area of the middle-of-nowhere to make quick returns practical or timely options.

Akita is not Tokyo, and I don’t live in a movie.

I must always remind myself of these rudimentary facts.

Further, there’s the reality of not living all that close to the train station in my town, which requires a too-long walk or a bus ride to get to. And frankly, I really hate buses, I have always hated buses –  despite the zealous attempts of my grandmother during my childhood to convince me that, really, they are great places to meet new people – and I will continue to hate buses, and on trains I never know where to look. Out the window awkwardly behind me? At the people sitting on the bench across from me? Certainly not eye-level with the people standing up and facing me!…which leaves an uninteresting spot on the floor to study, and even then I usually can’t affect that practiced, glazed over, Japanese stare into nothingness, and it’s more like me, making everyone else on the train uncomfortable because the gaijin girl can’t keep her eyes to herself. It’s just unpleasant for everyone involved.

So, generally, the train situation could have been better, and again my naïve ideas about life in Japan shatter into a million pieces upon actual execution in real life. It wouldn’t be the first time, and even 400 days into my ex-pat existence here, I doubt it will be the last.

It's Debatable

In the last month or so, my JTE has given me the task of teaching students how to debate. At first, I was like, Yeah! This is gonna be so fun!, because, ya know, I did debate in college, and knew that the particular group of kids we were going to be working with were smart, good students, and had strong English skills. I had heard success stories of Japanese students doing terrific debates under the tutelage of ALTs with less experience than me, so I figured with some instruction my little chickadees would be able to soar proudly on their own!


And then we got to class.

I split the students into larger groups, because, despite my admittedly out-of-proportion-with-reality expectations, I was still grounded enough to know it was going to be a difficult task for them to speak in English and wanted to break them in slowly. I presented the topic and asked them to brainstorm reasons for their assigned positions with their groups.

Me: This is what we’re going to do. Okay, now talk about it in your groups.

Students: *silence*

Me: You can use Japanese if you want!

Students: *lookatpapersilently*

Me: Does…anyone…have any…ideas?

Students: *morepaperlooking*

Me: For God’s SAKE, say anything at all!!

Students: *moresilence*

After two class periods of pulling teeth to get anybody to say anything (mind you, this had nothing to do with them not understanding or not having ideas – when I asked them to write down their ideas by themselves, they did just fine), I realized something fundamentally obvious about the situation that I had missed before – the students didn’t understand what to do with debate. They had no cultural background in it, they’ve never seen one, it’s not really used in the Japanese political system and even less so in the Japanese educational one. Yes, speaking in groups is difficult for them in its own right, given that they are taught to be listeners in classes and not initiators and it’s using a foreign language, but moreover, they legitimately didn’t know what kinds of things they were supposed to be saying or what their end goal was.

Mostly, this was my fault. If I had spent more time explaining what the hell they were working towards and how to get there and why and basically everything that I assumed they already understood but didn’t, then I’m sure the outcome would have been moderately less noiseless. Fortunately, I have another shot. Next week I’m putting on a three day English camp for eleven of these same ninenseis, and using a six-class debate curriculum made specifically for Japanese students that I hijacked from the Internet, I hope that the students are able to learn what I forgot I needed to teach them. It will also allow them to generate their own topics to talk about, which I hope will also illicit more of a response, if they are given opportunities to discuss what interest them instead of what interests me. Always learning…here’s to second chances!

Fear & Respect - A Class Profile

Generally, I would say the students I am closest to are my ninenseis at Kita Ko, my base school. I am at my base school the most and have lessons with the six ninensei classes (A-F) there the most often.


So I would say I know these kids pretty well. I have actual relationships with quite a few of them, and I know things about their lives, and we talk. But really, my favorite class as a group is the class that all the other teachers dislike teaching.

These kids don’t always pay attention, they talk during class and sometimes over the teacher, they misplace handouts and fail quizzes. Although they act much like an average class in America, maybe even like a better behaved one, they are little terrors by Japanese standards, especially in a school as prestigious as Kita Ko. Teachers balk at having to teach them, and the only subject they all do their homework for is math (they belong to the science track, so math and science are more their interests than English or…school…).

I love having class with these kids though, precisely because they don’t maintain the silent, model Japanese classroom. They make a rote lesson plan more interesting by being more interactive and showing more personality, even if they aren’t always interacting with the material at hand. I like joking with the girl in the back about how she never has her handouts and always responds with “Kami nai!” when I ask her about it. I loved when I congratulated one of the boys on his quite high writing test score, and he laughed and showed me his quite low reading test score. I think it’s hilarious that the two boys in the back always talk when they are supposed to be practicing reading, and then whip back to their papers whenever I walk by, even though all three of us know what’s going on.

However, I maintain a healthy fear of them. They kind of scare me because they are all little pranksters. Once, one of my favorite boys tried to get me to take a piece of gum from him. I was suspicious a) because they aren’t allowed to chew gum during class, and b) because Japan doesn’t sell packs of stick gum. I didn’t take it and told them it was scary, and later he showed me that it would have flicked my finger if I had taken it. And that is exactly the kind of behavior that endears them to me and makes the other teachers dislike teaching them. Straight up cheek.

The only thing they seem consistently interested in is pronunciation, and one of the most hilarious class incidents was when they were all trying to say “Ethiopia” correctly. My JTE has said they pay more attention when I am there, and I think part of that is because they are interested in my pronunciation. They will listen silently to my reading of a boring textbook story they have heard ten times when they will talk through things my JTE explains to them in Japanese. They are always asking me to pronounce words for them, and they’ve been struggling over “anxiety” for two weeks now. To my constant amusement.

These kids show more personality in class than the other classes (not that they have more than the other students…they just show it more), and that is why I love going to class with them. They are different. In a place that molds kids into perfect rule-followers, there’s the class that doesn’t conform. They once told me they wanted me to teach class by myself, and when I told them that would mean no Japanese at all, they seemed fine with it. But I’m pretty sure that’s because they had some kind of ulterior motive – which is exactly what makes them so fun.

Cow's Trip Across the U.K.

I recently returned from a trip to Scotland and England. Instead of boring descriptions, I have put together a photo chronology of the trip, featuring Cow, my new best friend. Cow is a stuffed highland cow (new second favorite animals, after owls). He is attached to my purse.

 Cow's first appearance in my life, in the wild of Edinburgh Castle

Cow in front of Edinburgh landscape, from South Bridge

Cow on the dashboard of the car, on our drive from Edinburgh to Inverness

Cow and me and a real highland cow, besides a Scottish castle

Cow in front of Cawdor Castle (yes, that's the Cawdor from Macbeth)

Cow in front of Loch Ness. No, I didn't actually see Nessie. That lifegoal remains unfulfilled.

Cow in front of the B+B in Penrith, in the Lake District

Cow on Hadrian's Wall, in the north of England

Cow in Oxford

Cow on the London Eye, with the Parliament Building and Big Ben in the background.
When I took this picture, this British dad beside me laughed, and so I explained that it was "Cow's Trip Across the U.K."
He appreciate it.

Cow at Odeon cinema, before we watched Predator 3D. I took several of these pictures, and the guy in the row in front of me finally turned around and said, Got a good one yet?, to which I responded, YEAH, Wanna see?
 I doubt he appreciated it.