Not Just Ninjas

I wasn’t sure how I would respond emotionally to coming back to work after vacation. Upon returning to Noshiro, I had a week left until school started, which meant sitting in the office from 8:30 to 4, wiling the hours away in a meaningless fashion to pacify parents (yes, I’m at school, yes, I’m “working”, thanks for providing my paycheck).

However, there’s enough down time here that the timbre of this vacant week didn’t feel very different from a normal work week. As a surrogate for being home for the holidays, I used the home ec ovens to bake coffee cake for all the teachers. This is one of the foods I bake in America for the holidays, so I wanted to bring a little piece of that here to share with others. Japan doesn’t really have specific “breakfast foods”, and certainly no one’s ever had this mystery substance “coffee cake” before. It was a pretty big hit, except for those inexplicable individuals who have a low tolerance for cinnamon (how can you not like cinnamon???) I also tried to untangle the deeper mysteries of karate by attending practice a few times in the school dojo.

Shortly after school started, one of the English teachers approached me during a quiet moment in the teachers’ lounge. She asked if we had a dress code in the US. This was, of course, prompted by a student flouting the dress code at my current school. What had this juvenile offender done to rock the boat? Her hair was now a Little Less Black.

Dying one’s hair is expressly forbidden for students at my school, as are crazy piercings, jewelry, makeup, untrimmed fingernails, nail polish, skirt hems too high, pants too low, or non-school issued shoes (with shoe trim color coded by grade, of course). However, this creative student had only bent the rules… she had not dyed her hair, it had not been bleached; it was simply lighter than the day before. And the day before that. And the day before that. A subtle enough change over time for her to deny that she had done anything unnatural at all (though the school apparently has pretty straightforward before and after pictures). Nevertheless, non-black tresses (not mine) could be easily spotted amidst a sea of otherwise uniformly black hair.

Wanting to genuinely know the answer, I asked the teacher as innocently and politely as I could: “What’s the worst that can happen if one girl has dark brown hair?”

And neither I nor my colleague really know what to say. We both understand that hair color is in this case a proxy for a more complicated and less tangible issue: personal autonomy vs. institutional authority. As a homeroom teacher in a Japanese high school, it is the teacher’s duty to look after her students and make sure they are respectful during and after school. Unlike American schools, teachers as well as parents take their kids’ behavior very seriously, and are responsible for their actions.

My colleague is so stressed out because her options seem to be:
1. confront the student’s parent, basically calling her kid a liar, or
2. fail her duty as a homeroom teacher.

The parent has also gotten involved and threatened to take the matter to the school board. In a country that values group harmony, I don’t envy my colleague’s position. All I could do was tell her that I came from a country where, when I was 15, one of my best friends had a nose piercing, pink hair, and wore lingerie as outerwear to school. And she didn’t turn out to be a sociopath. I hope that helps, sensei.

Good luck, whatever you decide to do.

So I bit the bullet today and wore a damn mask to work. It seems a bit counter-productive as a foreign language teacher to go to class with my mouth covered, but whatever. Coming from America, I feel absolutely ridiculous wearing a mask out in public. And then there’s the smelling your own breath all day aspect. Which becomes more of an issue after lunch… mmm. Miso and milk. But I had no choice, the chalk dust was killing me.

Today’s junior high classes were especially pleasant. I hadn’t particularly been looking forward to Christmas lessons, as I kind of secretly hate carols (unless they’re old ones) and am not a particularly festive holiday person. But today was awesomely fun.

First of all, I got to be Santa, thanks to a red coat and hat I found in my closet. Thanks, anonymous predecessor! I didn’t have a beard, but the mask made for a nice stand-in. My Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) asked me to bring in a True/False Christmas quiz. I had already quizzed some other students at another school, so I knew about some of the common misconceptions re: Christmas in America. So I got to dispel some myths: Not everyone in America celebrates Christmas. No, we don’t eat Christmas Cake, per se, not with strawberries and whipped cream, like everyone here does. Nor do we tend to consume massive quantities of fried chicken on Christmas Eve. I don’t care what you say, Santa’s not from Finland. And these little dudes named “elves” help him out with the presents. That freaked everyone out. “Like Snow White and the 7 Elves…?” Um… kinda. Close enough.

After which, the kids sat around making cards. I even was the proud recipient of one, which incorporated newly introduced concepts such as the 3-tiered snowman (here’s the Japanese version for contrast) and Santa eating cookies with milk.

ほほほ.

How best to celebrate your newfound understanding of left vs. right than with a spirited (and homemade!) game of Twister™? Featured here are my 6th grade girls and boys. Everyone took a very linear approach to the game, and refused to stray from their line of colored dots.

Something even more exciting than twister happened today… we had our first snow of the season, and some of it even stuck. Let the hibernation begin.  Wake me up in April.

On my first day of school, way back when, I was interviewed for the local paper. In this interview, I mentioned that my great love is African drumming and dance, specifically, the music from Ghana. Shortly thereafter, a Noshiro internationalization organization read this interview, and asked my boss if I would prepare an hour-long lecture on Ghana to present in November.

Allow me to shed light on the murky process of creating a JSL (Japanese as a second language) speech. Now there is no way I can write an hour long speech in Japanese, or even competently read Japanese aloud for five minutes. So I wrote my speech in English, and planned to flesh out the presentation with pictures, video, props, you know, the works. I then waited for a month for the community center to contact me to figure out the nitty-gritty logistics. A week before the presentation we met, and they took my speech to a translator. The result of which was a speech in kanji and kana, which I pretty much can’t read with any facility. I mean, sure, a quick sign or menu item, yeah, fine, but not a whole speech with 3 days notice. So this Japanese is then translated again into roomaji, so that I can read it at something approaching a speaking pace.

However, some of the Japanese is really complicated, and speaking in Japanese for an hour would pretty much fry my brain and frustrate my audience. Enter life-saver Yumeko, my eikaiwa partner-in-crime. This wonderful woman came over to my house and she listened to me go on and on about Ghana. She translated extra tidbits into Japanese, and she basically ended up reciting over half my speech for the presentation last weekend. To boot, she is an exceedingly good sport, and even though the weather is getting wintery, she let me dress her up in my Ghanaian up and down for the speech.

Amazingly enough, the speech went off without a hitch. Chris came along to give instrumental and AV aid. The room was full mostly of old ladies, with a few English teachers sprinkled in for moral support. I got to make up catchy Japanese teaching aids (Migi! Hidari! Migi, hidari, owari!) And that’s when my lifelong dream came true: an entire room full of Japanese people trying earnestly to do Ghanaian dance. I can now say that my purpose in life has been fulfilled. I even got my very serious boss to come up and dance.

Shazam!

This week’s eikaiwa was great because:

1. No new lesson plan was necessary because

2. I got a room full of people to cook me dinner. Woo-hoo!

Yes, this week’s “English” lesson was how to cook real San Diego food, which means… tacos, baby! Chris came along to help out with the cooking and delegating. First, he taught everyone how to make a flour tortilla. I think everyone was initially freaked out by the lack of an official recipe (flour, oil, and water? You just mix them til it feels right? But HOW MUCH?? AAAAAACK!), but then the class really got into it, and became a tortilla making machine. We mixed up some authentic smelling taco spices at home, made some fresh guac, and broke out the cheddar cheese Chris schlepped from Tokyo and BAM. Tastiness.

We had 2 whole hours to cook and eat, so the second hour we made s’mores (by request… someone had seen it done on TV), and whipped up some mexican hot chocolate, to round out the culinary theme. I daresay this is the first time any of my students have tried chili powder in hot chocolate. They’re probably thinking, “dude, what is it with these Americans wanting to put spices in all of their beverages? What the heck?” I shared with everyone the context of s’mores; how, to do it right, you need to be like 12 years old and at camp, sitting around a summer campfire, singing goofy songs and telling ghost stories. Everyone was all “this is a summer food?”, until I explained that most of America isn’t nearly as humid as Japan in the summer, and that many camps are in the mountains, so the evenings can be quite cool and conducive to campfiring.

All in all, it was a wildly successful evening of social eating, and the perfect prelude to Thanksgiving.

I am so happy, I could cry. Somewhy, somehow, we were served Indian food for lunch at my podunk Junior High School. We don’t even have any Indian food in town. I think the closest is like an hour’s drive away. Perhaps it was supposed to balance out the uber-Japanese meal we had yesterday: seaweed sauce on rice, sanma, miso soup with every Japanese vegetable I can’t name in it, and shredded salad of the same. But today! Oh gloriousness! There were lentils! Indian curry (kind of!) and Naan! Which was great not only gastronomically, but also comically, as anyone with a passing knowledge of Japanese can attest to:

Kore wa nan desu ka? (what is this?)
Kore wa naan desu. (this is naan)
Kore wa naan desu? (this is naan?)
So. (you betcha)

And then we all laughed for days. Nothing like a good language joke to really bring everyone together, you know?

For those of you who wonder what I am up to, here’s what I do every day. I couldn’t resist transcribing this latest essay that I’m editing (Jr. high)

My Dog

I’m doing a report on my wife. Her name is Bell. She is 2 years old. She is good at “Ote, Okawari, Fuse, touch”. She is very bark. becouse very bon’t be noisy. But very important. She is fun to me. I love her very much.

Hey, it has a strong ending. :)
If anyone has any light to shed on “Ote, Okawari, or fuse” please let me know.

The other day I was sitting in the teachers’ room, minding my own business, trying to prepare some materials for class. I needed some glue, and I knew I had seen some around. It’s a pale yellow liquid that comes in clear plastic bottles. So I started rooting around in my desk, digging through all the materials left to me by another JET, and I found such a bottle.

I was just about to spread this substance all over my papers, when something made me take a closer look at the bottle. It looked unusually… pretty… for a glue bottle. I noticed the word “nori” for glue was conspicuously absent from the packaging.

I went against all my training as a chemist and smelled the unknown substance. Lo and behold, I just barely saved myself from having to explain why I poured honey all over my schoolwork.

That would have been a tough one…. looses something in the translation.

But honestly, see if YOU can tell them apart.
(those living in or having lived in Japan are exempt)

Amazingly enough, no one asked me to prepare a lesson about Halloween this year. Some of my JET colleagues have had to teach class after class about this holiday, and often people who don’t particularly celebrate Halloween are asked to teach these lessons. For me, this day manifested itself through two parties, and my English club at school.

The Big Plans were to carve a pumpkin and drink spiced cider with my English club girls. Little did I know that extensive plans laid many moons ago were necessary to obtain a pumpkin for carving, even the smallish green variety that is the most common here. I foolishly went out with a song in my heart looking for said pumpkin to purchase the day before Halloween and there were none to be found. My co-teacher said she’d hit the streets on a squash-finding mission, but she too returned empty handed. Which means I had to come up with a quick plan B to save the party. What did we end up doing? Why Halloween origami, of course! There really is no entertainment related problem that origami can’t fix. So, possibly for the first time ever, Japan witnessed the creation of paper bats, pumpkins and ghosts.

The cider created more controversy than I had expected. I mean, how freaky can hot apple juice be, right?… but everyone flipped out. “You actually drink that stuff?” Indeed. Those crazy Americans. Heating their juice and putting spices in it. Has the world gone mad? I know I thought it had when I saw the spigots for the hot lemonade in one of the local restaurants. That’s crazy. Everyone knows lemonade is supposed to be one temperature, and that’s cold. I guess juice warmth or lack thereof is just a very personal issue. But the most objectionable quality to the juice seemed to be that I put cloves in it… not a very familiar taste to the Japanese tongue. If success is measured in intrigue, then hooray for me. If instead you measure success in volume of juice consumed… then I am afraid that I come out on the losing end of that one.

But I liked it, dammit.

As for dressing up, I’ll admit, I’ve never really been one to go all out for a costume. I’m a pretty lazy Halloweener. So I dug around in my closet, and came up with the idea for a Japanese schoolgirl, complete with plaid skirt and knee stockings. Almost independently, Chris decided to go as a Japanese school boy, which shows just how well matched our temperaments are. Yay for multi-person costumes! I have to say that the concept was more cerebral than visual, and almost everyone asked what we were dressed up as. If anyone knew me AT ALL, the skirt and makeup would have tipped them off that, yes, I was wearing a costume. We ended up just pointing to Chris’ hair barrette, at which point the costumes immediately became clear.

Thank you, boys of Japan, for giving us such a snappy visual cue to pounce upon.

What *exactly* possessed me to teach the electric slide to classrooms of sixth graders last week? Maybe it was the idea of Texans fuming about a crunchy Californian teaching line dancing sans boots and belt buckle. Maybe I am so starved for dance action that I am starting to hallucinate lesson plans. Maybe I just wanted to see if a roomful of Japanese kids could boogie. I even made the kids put their thumbs in their belt loops and swagger and everything.

Well… we tried, at any rate.

What’s next, the macarena?
Someone stop me, I’m on some sort of horrible rampage.