More News of the World

hey all,

Just some more quasi-random updates. I have 6 more days with my current company, and as far as I know, they have not informed my schools of my imminent departure yet, presumably because they haven't found a replacement.

It has been a bit difficult to care too much about the more unruly classes, because I'll only see them maybe one or two more times.

Friday I'm going in to my new company to talk about my teaching schedule for the up-coming weeks, instead of going to check out a new guest house like I thought I was originally. That has been moved to Sunday, leaving Saturday free.

The weather here has been rather eerie, to say the least. That record breaking hot summer, and now it has been rather cold and dreary for several weeks. The average has been 10C cooler than just two weeks ago; that's 18F degrees. That's like it being an average of 86F, and then the next day the average is 68F, and stays 68F for two weeks.

That's all for now.
Cheers

Another Quick Note

hey all,

Just another quick note here. The anniversary went really well. I got a cortisol shot from the doctors, who having heard my story about there being no problem with my x-rays last time and my arm still not back to normal despite not going rock climbing, not going swimming, not doing push-ups, pull-ups, or anything else for the last month; decided that it was probably tendinitis. It still hurts a little, but I think it should get be getting better. There's a lot less pain when I move my arm now, but there is still some soreness and it still feels like two rocks grinding against each other when I lower my arm from above my head.

Anyway, for dinner we came to my place and made lentil soup, karage (Japanese version of KFC), and apple crumble. After that we watched Avatar, which was pretty good. I don't know if it justifies the millions of dollars that it made, but it was fun.

Today was more house shopping, with lots of surfing the web, calling offices, and sending emails. We also went to a cool burger shop called Brozer's in Nihonbashi, which was expensive but quite tasty.

I've got four days of work this week, but on Friday I'm heading out to look at a guest house. Next week will be my last week of work for my current company. They still haven't told my schools, and have asked me not to tell them yet. I feel a little bad about that, but I've been working hard and have asked for higher pay, or advancement opportunities, and my company just asked me to wait. My schools can be fun to work at, but I'm really more of a nuisance than anything else for them, as my being there disrupts the normal schedule.

That's all for now.

Cheers,

Day Off, Housing

hey all,

Just a quick note. I had the day off today, and spent a small chunk of it helping Michi buy and install 1GB of RAM for her laptop, which was previously painfully slow. Now, it is almost tolerable. We also watched Shallow Hal, which for some reason she owns on VHS.

I've also been looking for housing, and as usual, because I talk about this kind of thing to most of the people I know here in Japan, I got some good advice on apartment hunting.

In other news, Saturday is Michi and I's 1 year anniversary. We're planning on doing that most romantic of all things, going to the hospital so she can check up with some of her doctors, and I'm also making an appointment because my arm is still not normal. After that, however, we're planning on cooking a meal at my place and watching Avatar.

Cheers,

Oze

hey all,

So yesterday I got back from my trip to Oze. I tried to make it an Outdoor Club trip, but there were snags. About 3 other people were interested, but only one actually emailed; the rest replied on the outdoor club website. In my opinion, the new club website is very poorly designed and I avoid it like the plague, so I wasn't aware that other people were even interested until pretty late.

In any case, Michi and I were definitely going to go, and as it happened the other people either lost interest or canceled at the last second.

Although several places seem to say that Oze is only 2 hours from Tokyo, that might be if you have your own private helicopter. For the rest of us, it means 2 hours by train (one of those hours by the shinkansen or "bullet train;" otherwise you need 3 hours), and a little over 2 hours by bus.

So why would we want to go to all that trouble? Well, Oze is one of the largest marshes in Japan, which makes the area a lot like Michigan, except with mountains.

Hiuchigatake, as seen across from Lake Oze. Day 1

Day 1.

Yours truly. Day 1

Lake Oze as seen from top of Hiuchigatake.

Red circle is our starting point for Day 2. Red trail shows our hiking path. Day 2

The wooden walkways laid out through the center of the marsh. Day 3.

We started from Oshimizu and finished at Hatomachitoge.

Black line shows hiking route. Red dots show our camp sites.

I'd really like to give a detailed itinerary, except that it is already 21:00 over here and I have work tomorrow. I'll just leave it at the following:

• Day 1: Get up at 6:00. Leave Tokyo around 7:00. Arrive at Numata train station around 9:00. Take incredibly slow bus from Numata to Oshimizu. Arrive around 11:30. Walk on really boring path for almost 3 hours. Arrive at campsite next to Lake Oze. Take hot shower and eat instant ramen.
• Day 2: De-camp and hike next to Lake Oze for an hour. Hide heavy luggage in the trees before hiking up Hiuchigatake, a 2356m mountain. Hike down the mountain, pick up luggage, and hike several more hours to arrive at second camp site. Eat more instant ramen, and take another hot shower.
• Day 3: It starts to rain before we can even eat breakfast or break the tent down, so we have to do everything in the rain and are already soaked before we begin hiking. My backpack is extra heavy thanks to the rain soaked tent inside. Really easy hiking this day, which is good because we are both tired and the rain keeps up from 4:00 until 12:00. We make record time, completing the course from our second camp site to Hatomachitoge more than an hour quicker than the map time estimate.

I saw almost no foreigners, which is kinda rare. We did visit somewhat off season, just like we visited Kyoto off season earlier this January. As I understand it, those wooden walkways get jam packed with people and are a real pain to be on during the busy times. You get several bus loads of 70 year olds who walk really slowly, stop to take pictures every few seconds, and keep up a lot of random chatter and you can imagine how bad the situation could be. You can't pass them either, because although it looks like regular ground, they have those planks for a reason: it really is a marsh, and you don't want to step in the water.

Cheers,

Turning Japanese

hey all,

I found myself explaining a particular section of Michigan highway to another Michigander, and when I looked at my hands, I realized that the traffic directions were reversed, as if we drove on the left side of the road (like they do here).

And now I have to resist correcting myself in Japanese when I have a slip of the tongue when speaking to someone who isn't Japanese.

I'll be doing a post about the Oze trip coming soon: I've just copied 100+ pictures to my computer, and haven't even sorted out the keepers from the trash.

Cheers,

House Hunting

hey all,

I'm just thinking right now how much I hate shopping in general, and now I'm shopping for a place to live that a) will be a nice place to live for a few months b) won't cost me a fortune in commuting and c) will be available when I need to move there.

It seems that these conditions are rare. One of my friends recommended company X, but when I went to their website, they advertised themselves as being amazing because instead of the usual 2 month's rent non-refundable bribe to the landlord, they only charged 1 month's worth of rent. No thanks. I appreciate honesty when someone is trying to screw you over, but that doesn't mean I'm going to hand the person the lubricant.

I still can't believe the idiotic rent system here in Japan, but there you have it.

Cheers,

Story of Last Friday

hey all,

I thought I'd share the story of last Friday, because I think it is a little funny.

I came home from work to find a delivery attempt notice from the Japan Post. After fumbling around with the automated voice system, I finally got them to arrange to deliver my package later that night.

That done, I started my laundry: a load of whites; mostly my work shirts and undershirts. As I was waiting for my package, I noticed the laundry machine had stopped, and was in fact giving some kind of error message. As it happened, one of my house mates was having a Japanese friend over, and he was kind enough to help out by calling the company and ask them to come and fix it that night.

I decided to make dinner and have a shower in the mean time, and while I was in the shower, of course my package arrived. Luckily, that same housemate picked it up for me. While waiting for the repair man, I looked up the details on how to transfer money from the US to Japan, and got a transfer underway. He showed up at 22:00, or 10PM, a half an hour late, and stayed until almost midnight.

While I was babysitting the repair guy, my US bank called to confirm the details of the transfer, but I was away from the phone.

But eventually, he fixed the washer, and I was able to finish my laundry. I even got my bank to call me back and was able to complete the transfer. Anyway, that was how I spent last Friday night; going from one happenstance to another.

Cheers,

Life Continues

hey all,

Life continues here in Japan. North Korea has not backed up its threats to nuke Japan; the Prime Minister Kan has beaten back a threat to his leadership; and thankfully the summer heat is starting to abate. According to the Japanese Meteorological Agency, we just had the hottest summer in 113 years. But other sources cite 1946. Personally, I have to doubt the 113 years claim a little. If for no other reason that Japan can't seem to keep track of things for that long.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to check out what's been going on with the aging Japanese population. Japanese people are very proud that their country has such high longevity, but recently it has come to light that maybe as many as 240,000 people thought to be over 100 years old, are actually dead. This, despite the fact that the Japanese government is still paying retirement, and health insurance money for their corpses. That's right: their sons and/or daughters were defrauding the government out of money by not reporting the deaths of their parents, and continued to collect the welfare support. I can't imagine any other country just loosing track of 240,000 people, continuing to pay welfare for them for years and years (in some cases these people are believed to have died in the chaos after WWII, so over 70 years for some).

Anyway, that is the news of Japan. Classes continue, and I'm getting more and more fed up with them. Below is an example of how my schedule changes: this is typical of 2 out of my three schools. My favorite school almost never changes the schedule.

So I've been dealing with this for several months now, but there are so many stories that I'd love to get out there. Like my English classes being canceled because they were scheduled at the same time as that class's pool time. I'm a strong supporter of swimming: I was a lifeguard and swim teacher for 6 freaking years. But the pool isn't going anywhere; I have other classes to teach, other schools to go to, and what kind of message does that send to the students about English? Pool time is more important than English time?

Or about CD players. You might think that being in Japan, I am living in some kind of technological paradise (check out this Onion article, for instance). But I can't count the times when I've gone to a class room and wasted like 10 minutes waiting for a CD player. Oh, they have CD players in the classroom, but a lot of them don't work. Or the buttons don't do quite what they're supposed to, as even the Japanese teachers can't figure out what to do with them. I've had classes where they will literally bring in 3 or 4 CD players until we find one that works. Not only that, but I've seen them take out a brand new CD player from a box for class, and put the stupid thing back in the box after class. That's right: they want to keep using the CD players that don't work. We have like 60 in HD flat panel TV's  in every class room, but can't scrounge up a decent CD player.

Or when I've had a homeroom teacher fall asleep at their desk during one of my classes. I'm feeling less and less sorry about leaving this kind of teaching environment behind. Some of the teachers and some of the students were really fun to work with and teach to, but let's be serious.

I complained earlier about my commute, and the chatty school girls on the bus, but recently I've been sharing my morning bus ride with an autistic person who spends the whole trip slapping his checks rhythmically with both hands and groaning. Isn't that just a great warm up to a full day of teaching English with indifferent teachers to rowdy rude students in classrooms without decent air conditioning?

In two days, I will have been in Japan for 1.5 years, or something like 497 days. Also in a few days (this weekend, in fact) I plan on taking my first outdoor trip in quite some time. My shoulder is still bugging me a bit, but it is definitely slowly returning to normal. The plan is to go to Oze National Park, which is a highland marsh area that is pretty famous in Japan. Until a few years ago, it was part of Nikko National Park, which I've never been to, but that should give you some idea of where it is (near Nikko, which is to say, a few hours north of Tokyo).

There are several breathtaking mountains in the area, and the weather is looking decent but not incredible (maybe a little cloudy) for the three day weekend. As usual, there is much more to see there than can be seen in a single trip, especially since it offers different views and flora depending on what season you go there. I'm really looking forward to it.

For the next two days, I work at my school which always lets me leave early, so I'm going to try to bake some of my patented dried cherry oatmeal cookies. Yes, the ones where the girls in my high school lit class were jokingly offering to marry me, as long as I'd stay home all day and bake the suckers for them.

Aside from that, I need to put in some serious study time on Japanese. I've been using a site called smart.fm which one of my friend's recommended to me for studying Japanese, and it is quite nice. I still think I wouldn't pick up much from it if I wasn't here in Japan or if I hadn't taken actual Japanese classes in the US, but all the same, a nice piece of work. The thing that's been really nice is hearing my teachers or principals use words that I'm studying, or running across them in my Japanese translation of A Game of Thrones. I'm now on volume 4 out of 5 in that book, by the way.

Cheers, and don't let the bed bugs bite,

Wow

hey all,

So life in general has been a real roller coaster recently. To explain, I need to go back in time a little bit.

Last weekend, I thought Michi and I would be studying at the library on Sunday. Well, I didn't hear from her at all on Saturday, as my phone calls and emails weren't answered. I got an email Sunday morning saying she was going to Kamakura to write out by hand a Buddhist sutra. Why, exactly, I'm not really sure.

Anyway, that night she calls and at first everything is fine, but then this stream of really harsh stuff starts gushing from her mouth. Apparently, she had been talking with her parents just before, and her mother had expressed all sorts of worries about our future. After all, I don't have a really great job, my Japanese is not that good yet, and Michi is a bit older than me, so it isn't like she can really afford to waste time with any losers. So I got to hear all of that second hand, coming from someone I've grown to like and trust.

I didn't sleep really well that night, wasn't feeling very energetic at work on Monday, and basically announced that we were finished Tuesday afternoon.

Fast forward a few hours and I received a call from another company. I won't reveal their name here, but they asked me if I could come in sometime. As it happened, I had today off, and said I could come in.

Later that night, I was over at Michi's with the rapidly wavering intention of picking my stuff up (toothbrush, a green chef's apron made by my sisters), and suddenly I was crying, and she was saying she was sorry. And somehow things became OK again.

After we'd both settled down, I mentioned that I was going in to teach at this company, and she flipped out. She'd seen this company on Japanese TV, where it was listed as one of the three best English schools in Japan.

The next day, when I went into the school, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but the building seemed very nice, and the staff seemed pretty friendly. But the kids were just amazing. One of the teachers had prepared a lesson about Earth's tectonic plates, which I taught to 4 classes, the youngest of which was 4 students about 2 years old. Overall, the students were polite, interested in learning, and pretty fun. Not only that, but most of the students could read, and all of them could speak at a ridiculously high level of English. Unlike education in Japan's public schools, everything was taken very seriously. Students who misbehaved were called out, or made to sit in the corner, which I've never seen happen in a public school. (Aside from talking to the students, there is basically almost nothing a public school teacher can do, and besides which, ALTs stand even lower on the authority totem poll than real teachers.)

For some reason, they offered me a job, and I've decided to accept. It means moving to Yokohama, which is about an hour away, but Michi has been thinking about moving somewhere around that area anyway. I've informed my current company of my intentions. The job doesn't start until the end of October, so I have a little time to look for guesthouses, and the president of the school seemed like she really wants her teachers to be happy (so her happy teachers can happily teach happy students, I guest). The starting pay is a bit higher than what I made last year full time, but I fully expect teaching there to be more challenging.

That's all for now.

Cheers,

Full Swing

hey all,

The school year is back in full swing. I taught at my least favorite school today, but classes actually went OK. The one class of 6th graders that usually gives me hell has been on some sort of angelic trip lately, so they've been listening attentively and seem to be enjoying classes.

When I taught a 4th grade class today, I had my Japanese teacher actually seem to fall asleep at his desk, instead of help me with the class, so that was a pretty bad class, but the next 4th grade class went really smooth.

I think I mentioned that the metal hinges on my satchel have been wearing away, but actually a totally different part of it broke on my way to school today, forcing me to carry the thing in my hands. I think I'm going to be really ghetto and repair it with some twine.

That's all for now.

Say It Ain't So

hey all,

I taught at one of my two favorite schools today, but they changed things up on me. Usually at my elementary schools, they either have a pre-existing lesson plan they want me to follow, or they let me basically do the lesson myself. As long as I cover the appropriate subject, nobody really cares too much.

Today, for three of my four classes, I almost did nothing. I came to class, did opening and closing greetings, and helped with pronunciation, helped keep the kids focused by directing their attention to the Japanese teacher, etc. But my actual teaching time (versus assistant teacher time) was limited to the one class. I've been told that this school is planning on increasing the number of English classes from about 30 to 45 next year, but they don't plan on bringing in foreign teachers for more days. I guess that would drive the budget too high, or something. So instead, these classes were something like practice sessions for the homeroom teachers to teach English.

Overall, the three classes lead by the Japanese teachers all went pretty smoothly. The only problems were poor English pronunciation, some incorrect grammar, and some times being unable to hear the teacher's voice; but really, I'm sure I do some really bad mispronunciations in Japanese, and sometimes talk to quickly or quietly for the students. My big problem is that I decided last year that I wanted to work at elementary schools because at junior high schools I didn't really do anything. And now this school has turned the tables and made me into an assistant again. I guess I should be happy, because I still get paid the same, but now have even less work to do, but still.

Anyway, I'm not sure what my plans are for the weekend. Michi is getting a tooth checked on at the dentist, so I might be staying home Saturday, and maybe we'll go to a library on Sunday again.

My shoulder seems like it is slowly getting better, but I still don't have confidence in doing a big rock climbing trip near the end of this month.

Cheers,

Return to Normalcy

hey all,

My first day back actually went very smoothly, especially considering that I was substituting at another teacher's school. I was able to get up on time, had breakfast (a raisin bagel left over from helping Michi's dad move that massive desk), and even found the school without once getting lost.

The only hitch in the whole thing was that on the lesson plan/schedule I had received from my company, I was supposed to teach a unit on numbers, but actually the ALT for that school had already finished it and the school didn't bother to tell me until I was half way through my first lesson. Oh well. A little annoying, and it kinda killed my flow that I had going, but overall it still went pretty well.

They even let me leave early after lessons were finished like my one favorite school does, so that was just an extra bonus.

I used the spare time to stop by a drug store and pick up something that had ibuprofen in it. I think it might actually be something like Midol, judging by the name, but it has 150mg of good stuff per pill, so whatever.

In other news, I watched Kick Ass and Daybreakers, two movies that came out recently, and I was impressed by both of them. I ran across reviews of them on The Escapist, and decided to check them out. I highly recommend both of them. Kick Ass is an over-the-top comedy superhero movie with great action sequences, a good story, and even good acting (which is hard to come by in certain other mainstream franchises I could name); and Daybreakers is a movie actually about the oil crisis, but masquerading as a gory, intelligent vampire flick.

I have tomorrow off, so that means surfing the web, and studying Japanese.

Cheers