Meanwhile, in Toyama...

I had a leaving ceremony of sorts during my last ever visit to a special school last week (as a teacher at least). Whenever I leave there I feel like a totally overpaid incredibly handsome fraud. These kids, surely, get nothing out of me. Thirty minutes a week is not enough for them to actually learn anything productive. Each week we play a game that's a variation on the previous week and which is so easy that I could teach it tied and gagged from a thick canvas bag. Down a well. I feel incredibly guilty. I can see it in the eyes of the other teachers: "my god, you get paid to do that? I bet you're drunk right now as well..."

They gave me a send off though. First we played a massive version of snakes and ladders that I had made ("Kondo, roll the big dice, the box there. Here, roll it. Oh, um, kick, okay kick it, here let me…oh look you 'dropped' it, ah ha, so you got a five. Lets move five places…Okay, I'll move five places! Okay! Oh look you landed on "swimming"! Say swimming! Sw-...Swimm... okay, lets wipe that up...right! Tsugawa! Roll the dice, the big box thing here...").

After that (“Wow! Everybody won! Isn’t that great!?”) the teacher got out all manner of strange looking instruments. They were going to play "Edelweiss" for me. The lullaby. Anyway, Tsugawa gave a rousing performance with his breath-operated keyboard, Kuniya screamed unintelligibly but in tune, and Kondo kicked at a keyboard held at his feet by a teacher. Shimoda sat by staring at gosh-knows-what while a teacher played the triangle for him. The cacophony was actually quite moving.

Then we moved onto 'games'. Kuniya asked me to put my finger in a Chinese finger-trap snake ("Oh no! Kuniya! Oh dear! I can’t get my finger out - Kuniya! Arg! Heh heh, um. No, really, I cant get it out..." wild laughter all round), Kondo gave me an envelope marked 'scorpion' which when opened an elastic banded coin spun against the paper to sound like a scorpion ("Arg! Kondo! A real live scorpion! Oh no! Arrrg! Whoo-wee, you really got me there Kondo! Ha ha!" - wild laughter all round) and then Shimoda gave me a box wrapped in string. "Open quickly" the teacher whispered - and out sprung home-made springy snakes made of milk-cartons and elastic bands ("ARG! Snakes! Real live snakes – IN A BOX! Jesus! Shimoda! Arrrrg!" - wild laughter all round). It was pretty fun actually.

I'm also closing in on my last days at Kureha High School. I had my 'farewell ceremony' at Kureha this morning. It's the ceremony where I stand on stage and get my Japanese speech wrong, drop the microphone, and generally entertain the students. Just like class actually. The principal to gave a quick speech about me, and then the students had to send me off. 568 of them parted down the middle and I was ushered through like Moses, to ecstatic applause. As I walked I waved to a few kids I knew. Several boys ran out to shake my hand and run back again. As I got to the back of the hall the calligraphy teacher, Mrs Yamazaki, gave me a thick envelope saying "puresento!" and then "go staff room," because it seems I can't hang around for the rest of the ceremony if I'm 'leaving' (though I still have until Monday to clear my desk). The present was a very beautiful kanji print she had made, the meaning apparantly: ‘Spring Has Come, The Water Is Clear You Can See Forever.’

As well as Robin and I several other JETs are leaving Toyama this year. The bulk of the second years are leaving and around half of last years crop. Some people are sad to be leaving, others cant wait to get out, and a few are being left behind. It’s always sad to leave friends behind and to see them go. Being here for just a short year I have made lots of friends, many of them I’m sad to leave, but this is the price you pay for being a Drifter Junior Grade.

As part of the leaving comes the drinking. It seems like everybody has been leaving for the past month; the JET community in Toyama is a close knit one and so several parties have been needed to properly say goodbye to everyone. Two weeks ago for the England v Portugal world cup semi final there was a party in Uozu, a town several train stops away. The build up to the match was a set given by Toyama’s resident band The Bento Boys, who like nothing better than rapping on the life of a JET. After the tragic hush that followed several highly paid sport stars totally failing at what they practice every day of the year, the bar emptied quietly and people started to go home. I missed it all however as I was arguing politics with some guy whom I will probably never meet again. I was told a few days later that we then went on to another bar until the early hours of the morning. I’m also told that Brad and I had had a conversation on the train right up to his stop, one before mine, in which he told me not to fall asleep. I woke up in Kanazawa, an hour away and in the next prefecture. I woke totally confused as to where I was, where I had been, and indeed who I was. When I finally got back to Toyama at 9am I discovered that I had lost my umbrella, my Bento Boys CD, and my book (Salinger).

The ‘official’ leavers party was in on a campsite in Toga over two days – because that’s just how JETs roll. The campsite was actually the venue of the Welcome Weekend, which was nicely cyclical. I remember little of it other than a power hour with Max, Brad, and Emily and a football game in which I, as usual, slide tackled sopmebody and tore my knee and my elbow to shreds. On the Sunday afternoon we decided to have a Nepalese curry at a nearby restaurant. Tucked away in deepest Ishikawa-ken is a Nepalese restaurant and museum. A group of Nepalese run the place during the summer and escape during the winter as Toga, and indeed much of Eastern Japan, is buried in snow. On the hour each day the chefs and waitresses perform a traditional Nepalese dance, like fools they asked us to join in.

Nice Men


Nice Ladies


Uh? Oh dear, it's all gone wrong


Very wrong


Of course, Toyama JETs can’t just leave it at that. On the final weekend there was another party. The theme of this party was Toga - as in the bedsheet wearers of yore. It's enough for the Japanese to have to witness the rabble that is drunken JETs stumbling through town but when they're not quite wrapped in bedsheets I really feel for them. Many people were leaving the next morning so there were teary farewells and manly handshakes all round, and copious irresponsible drinking. This is what happens when you down someone else’s drink only to discover that it is a tequila poured by an overly generous barman. Ahem.





Arg! Togas!

Gandhi?


Hey, nice sword...








At some point during the last two weeks I have a hazy recollection that we went on a 'Beer Tram.' Imagine this amazingly simple and amazingly awesome concept: beer, on a tram. Commuting, but with none of the drawbacks and all of the benefits. I'll let the photos explain.





Hey, I've got a great idea...!



In the last few weeks it hasn't all been high jinks and hedonism, there has been some culture too. Ikebana is the Japanese art of arranging flowers, in a very particular Japanese way, and so we went to the annual Toyama Ikebana Competition last saturday. I was mightily impressed by the displays, here are a few:







The best of course was this one:



Hang on, I recognise that! Isn't that a...Robin Burfield?



Robin has been attending ikibana classes for the past few months and has made considerable progress, so much so that she entered to rave reviews.

However, I dont think this chap was impressed by anything.



So this is the end. It was fun, mostly. A lot of it was entertaining, a lot infuriating, but this is surely the charrenge of living in an entirely alien culture. You may remember back in April my agonising over recontracting. I can look back now and know that I made the right decision; I am ready to leave; to get on with the next thing. The thought of staying another year gives me a stomach ache, but recently so does the thought of leaving. It’s a strange place this.

Flies In Your Eyes

One aspect of working in Japan that I certainly will not miss is having money demanded of me every month from one or more of my teachers for parties and trips that a) are extremely expensive; b) I do not want to go on but must; and c) I never enjoy.

First of all I hate the way they ask:

"Geoff-san, you give two thousand yen for teacher party"
"Geoff-san, now give me four thousand yen for school excursion"
"Geoff-san, you must pay now six thousand yen for school party"

And they always ask me for it all at once a few weeks after payday, when I have budgeted all my money and have nothing left.

Today my supervisor told me to give her money for the school trip.

"Eh? That was months ago, I thought I paid for that. Plus, it rained, it was awful."
"Geoff-san, you must pay. You have pay for English teachers party yes. And, ne, you have pay for school enkai?"
"What? I thought that was free?"
"Maybe it is a lot of money ne?"
"Well, it's over a hundred dollars altogether"
"Maybe you can complain to someone..."
"...count to ten count to ten..."
"You are counting?"
"Yes, er, no....I mean...Why am I only told now?"
"...?"
"What I don't get, you know, I've never had to actually pay to go to work before."
"..."
"Right, well, okay, I'll see Mitsuda-sensei and, okay...five six seven eight...."

I have to pay about $100 to have to pretend to have fun with teachers who ignore me most of the time in school.

Another thing I wont miss is the tendency to 'pass' every student, regardless of his or her actual grade. While assessing students' communication activity presentations the ALT and the JTE separately grade the groups out of five. Then the mean must be taken between the two grades and each student in the group gets that grade. I think this is unfair since the mean of any two grades out of five will always end up being three, penalising the good students and rewarding the bad. I questioned my supervisor about this system, "Ah but it is fair ne?" She replied. Not really, no; in the first term every student got the same mark.

In the second term I attempted to correct the system by introducing half-marks, in effect increasing the range of potential scores. However, the JTEs caught on to this and instructed me to round up every half mark. Funnily enough for the second term every student got roughly the same marks, but higher.

During my third and final term I decided that I had had enough. At the end of one presentation one student in the group still hadn't said anything. The JTE started applauding, signalling the next group to come up. As they started to shuffle off stage I stopped them and pointed to the girl, "anata wa?" I said pointing at the girl, "are you going to say anything?" She stepped back on the stage and, looking at her feet, said: "Sank you.” According to the grading guidelines, for her one line, she should get the average 3/5 mark for the group. It was at this point that I started to dock marks from the individual students that didn't try. It was also at this point that I began to disregard each JTE score that disagreed with mine. Throughout the entire year here I have compared the JTEs evaluations with mine and repeatedly wondered if they have been watching the same presentations as me. One group I graded 1.5 out of five, as they had spent the entire presentation giggling and got out about three words in English. The JTE gave them a four. Out of five. She’s just passing them all through.

Think you're making a difference? You're really not.

"...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped"

I had my last ever lessons last Monday. I had been looking forward to it for quite some time. In fact, in my diary I marked the day with one word: "Freedom"

1st Grade commucation activity presentations were scheduled for that day. A communication activity is where I set a project, to be completed over the last ten minutes of four lessons, culminating in a 'performance' in front of the class. Activites include simple things like 'Holiday: You are in a foreign city. Hail a taxi, have a short conversation', or 'Commercials: write and present a commercial for an imaginary product. Go mad. Really." The idea is for the students to have fun with English because they have creative control. Unfortunately if you put three Japanese students up in front of the class they will do one, and sometimes all three, of the following: giggle continuously; stare at the floor while doing side-to-side head motions; or talk absolute nonsense, thanks to the wonderful electronic dictionaries the teachers encourage students to get.

Performance day is a very trying day in general. For my last day however I was determined to be cheerful - Hey! Not doing this again! Excellent mis-useage of that verb Kenji! Well done Yuka, good job staring at that floor! By the third lesson I had welts on my palms from my own nails, but, it was my last ever lesson so I persevered. At the end of each lesson that day the JTE asked me if I had any final advice for the kids. Well, yes, actually. Now, everyone, pay close attention...and I explained in very easy English with funny little cartoons on the board to illustrate why mixing up 'a' and 'the' can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Lots of staring. This happens a lot and whenever I try to explain anything. I tried to get the teacher to explain in Japanese, but, as always...

"OK. Sensei, I'm not sure they understood that. Could you explain in Japanese?"
"The students have understand."
"Hmm, no. You see I'm not sure they have understand, er, understood. I've explained this many times and they still get it wrong."
"No, they have understand, it is okay."
"Yes, but really, I dont think they have, and this is quite important, fundamental even..."
"Fun metal?"
"No, fundamental, funda- it's really important"
"It is okay, they have understand"
"...Well."

This is the standard response I get from JTEs and normally it riles me because if they don't/can't explain what I say to the student's understanding, then what really am I here for? Certainly not job satisfaction. However, it was my last lesson ever, I was fine with it, even expected it. Would have been odd not to get it.

At the end of the lesson all the English teachers suddenly appeared in the classroom, then the class leader stood up with a massive bunch of flowers he had been magically hiding under his desk. He came to the front and, staring at the floor and rubbing his eyes and scratching his head said "Geoff, sank you..eto...thank you teaching...sank you. Uhhhhh...thankyougoodbye" and gave me the flowers, a decorated piece of board with little messages from every student written on it, a bag of origami cranes with little messages inside them, and the prop he used for his commercial for 'Jom Juice' ("It high warm up forever drink!"). I swear I almost sniffled during the applause. Bloody kids.

Click for larger image.