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,
