%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |
The experiences of a father and son struggling to communicate without a shared tongue. |
| What is it, beyond language, that is tested in the open, strained, by the stresses, the pushes and pulls of love? |
| Wife is in training for the next three weeks as part of her university education. This means that she stays up until 1 a.m. preparing reports, clothes and lunch for the next day, and then gets up at 4 or 5 a.m. to catch the earliest bus to her university. This means that the mornings of just son and I have returned. Some of the old stress of those times has come back now that mom is not there to translate for us. This morning everything was going smoothly until son realized he didn't have a notebook of unlined paper in which to draw a cartoon before school. I told him it wasn't important and that, anyway, he didn't really have time for this, but he insisted, got angry, shouted...the way he used to get any time I didn't understand something. I'd like to say I've learned something about how to handle this situations in the intervening months--and I think I have. I sat him down with me, dried his tears, and told him I would buy him a new notebook today for him to use, and would he please draw me a really strange cartoon so I could laugh. He agreed. On the way out the door, he admitted he really didn't want to go to school today. One reason, he said, is that at the after-school daycare, he is getting bullied. I'm not sure how bad the situation is yet. I suspect it's the usual kids stuff, and I don't want to stop that from happening because I want him to learn how to deal with that kind of bulls***--I got it really bad in junior high, and I wished then that it would stop, but now I understand how truly meaningless and small those words were. I want son to have that understanding as well. Still, it makes my blood boil and to wish for a confrontation with their parents--or, better yet, a really bad skin disease to infect their childrens' crotches (nothing permanent and disfiguring, but just enough to keep them itching and crying late into the night). In less than an hour I've to to go teach at a grade school for a couple of hours, come home, make lunch, go shopping, teach, write, catch the train for half an hour, teach for 4 more hours, return home at 9:30 p.m., eat dinner, write (hopefully, but I've been lazy as hell these last few days in that respect), go to bed and get up for the whole thing to start again. This morning I've already gotten the kid off to school, done the laundry, washed the dishes, cleaned the bathroom and done this blog entry. I am more productive when busy but what about the kid? I know this is not good for him. Yesterday in class, a student as me if I would rather have a raise or more free time. I said a raise. She asked why. I said it was because my salary is so low right now that I have to work all the time and don't have any time to be with my family. She, a customer in a school which pays me s*** poor, asked, "Is that true?" I said yes. Gotta go. |
| When I first read this sentence in a newspaper a few months ago, I didn't really understand. "Japan is a tribal society": what did that mean? Japan is, arguably, one of the more modern societies in the world. We usually associate the word "tribal" with "primitive". The article went on to explain that a tribal society seeks to instill in its members sense of responsibility to the society as a whole and, particularly, to the family. Children in a tribal society are recriminated according to the shame they might bring on the family. Again, I didn't really understand this. I grew up in the U.S., so I wasn't familiar with such a system, so I resolved to watch my family in Japan more closely to see if this description was accurate. Sure enough, this morning, I saw clearly that, according to this criteria, Japan is a tribal society: when my son sneezed and wiped his nose on his sleeve, my wife reprimanded him for what other people, if they saw, would think of his parents (not of him). "If someone saw you, they are going to think your parents don't know how to use a handkerchief." Now, in the U.S., my mother would've have said something like, "People are going to think you don't know what a handkerchief is," placing the onus of shame squarely on my shoulders. It's a heavy burden children in Japan carry: the obligation they have to preserve their family's respect. I'm very uncomfortable with it. |
| Yesterday was supposed to be an ultra-fun night: wife was going out for drinks with some former workmates, so I and son would be home aloe all night: tv, games, popcorn. When I came to pick him up at after-school daycare, I had already toyed with the idea of letting him skip his exercise class. When he said, first thing, "I don't to go today" it clinched the deal. Telling him he didn't have to go, that he would have to wait at home for an hour while I taught a lesson, made him smile so big. But, just as we pulled into the parking lot of our apartment to drop him off at home, mom shows up, confused that we are not at the gym already. Negotiations resume. She fails to see the benefit of letting him skip, viewing it as dangerously habit-forming. Son relents and says he'll go the exercise class. I take him. We have a so-so night: my neck hurt and I couldn't play fight with him the way he wanted. We tried to play a video game, but soon lost interest. Ended the night on a good note: we watched "don't laugh" TV and laughed and laughed. So, not such a bad night. I feel down at the moment. I wrote a review of a poem on WDC, but the writer didn't appreciate my review at all: "I hate reviews like this. It's my poem. Don't tell me to change it." Haven't run into that infantile mentality in years, and it reminded me of some of the more "sensitive" types I dreaded sharing a writing class with in university. Now I have this batch of negativity to carry with me (on top of my usual load) through a day of working at a job I hate. Argh. |
| For son: You must go out and take chances, get hurt, have adventures. If you listen to your mother's people, you will live a long, safe, boring life. Life, no matter how long it is, is always too brief; and it should never be something merely endured. I love you. Now, ignore what I just said, go out: find what works for you. This is not a rehersal. I write this knowing it will be many years, if ever, before you read this. I could tell you, but the age, experience, and language barrier will reduce what I say to just so much noise. It is funny how the desire to speak to you is strongest on those days when your culture depresses me the most, when your people annoy me the most, when I worry about your future and mine, riding on the train, watching row after row of houses and factories flick by, and all the faces dour. It is the cusp of summer, and no one is happy--least of all your father. |
| I reject the recent, wide-spread acceptance that inter-breeding occurred between neanderthals (homo neandertalis) and modern humans ((homo sapiens) based on the existence of 1% (or less) of similar DNA between the two species, as announced in Science magazine. I do so not out of religious or prejudicial sentiments: I am not, if you haven't already realized, religious, and I believe that neandertals were an exceptional, remarkable species of human, superior to modern humans in many ways, and perfectly adapted to the cold climate and harsh conditions of the previous Ice Age. I accept fully that modern humans and Neandertals co-existed for 30,000 years in parts of central Asia and Europe, and that there must have been some sort of exchange between the two species (it sets my imagination on fire wondering what it would have been like to communicate with another species of human); these exchanges, however, did not, I believe, involve genetic material.They were different species; by definition, different species cannot produce viable off-spring capable of reproduction. I do believe, because not only did I spend 10 years at university but also grew up in some very rural areas, that some modern human, drunk on fermented berries, might've looked at a Neandertal woman and thought: "Hey. WTF? I'll give it a shot."* If it turns out that inter-breeding did occur and that we modern humans (particularly those descended from populations once inhabiting central Asia and Europe), do have a little Neandertal DNA in us, well, then I will laugh, laugh, laugh. Why? Think about it: For a century, we have looked on the Neandertals as cavemen: brutish, uncivilized, sub-humans. Now, what if it turns out that those modern populations who once thought they were so much more advanced, more evolved, as it were, turn out to actually have some DNA in them that means, on average, they are less evolved than, say, their African counterparts? Oh, I can only imagine, and when I do so, I smile, because either we will have to change our public perception of the Neandertals or accept that, once and for all, DNA has little to do with the behavior of specific individuals. |
| He is tall, broad-shouldered, fit and trim, wearing a soft, purple shirt and brown slacks. He is handsome, but not sexy. Clean-shaven, wearing glasses, he weaves in and out of the pairs of Nipponese geriatrics as they wander the aisles. He has headphones in his ears, listening to The Butthole Surfers. A half-smile graces his thin lips. Perhaps he is remembering son's presentation for Show and Tell just ten minutes before, in which son loudly and proudly proclaimed: "This is my baseball glove. It is very important to me. Santa gave it to me two years ago. I play catch my dad in the park a lot and have fun." He has done the dishes, the laundry, delivered son's after-school daycare clothes, written an essay, and is now doing the household shopping, all before 10:30 a.m. Soon he will go home, make and eat lunch, and then go to work until 7:30 p.m. After work, he will pick up son and bring home to put to bed. He doesn't know when his wife gets home tonight. He doesn't care. On his cellphone is a message: "Thank you for everything you have been doing to help me and also you are going to do for us. I lost the timing to say sorry for the last few days to you. I am sorry." He hasn't replied, and he doesn't intend to. A cellphone message after days of disrespect, shouting, insults and accusations--during Show and Tell, as the other children mumbled their way through, Dis-Ease considered calling it quits, walking away, getting a place of his own and sending money. Son smiled at him many times during class. Dis-Ease smiles as the cashier takes his money, and wonders what it would be like to get her in the sack. He has never felt so alone. He wants to feel good. He wants someone to make him feel good. He knows it is impossible. In his mind, just below the loud music that almost, but not quite, manages to drown out his thoughts, the line keeps repeating: "Dis-Ease's right-evil mind rails constantly against the knowledge that it is easier to hurt than to heal. Dis-Ease's right-evil mind rails constantly against the knowledge that it is easier to hurt than to heal. Dis-Ease's right-evil mind rails constantly against the knowledge that it is easier to hurt than to heal." |
| Well, got the wife to stay home instead of sleeping at her parents'. Tomorrow is Mother's Day. Son drew a picture of me, his father, for Mother's Day, at school. What does one do in this situation? 10:30 p.m., and I am awake, dreading the morning. |
| ...that the no country will show support to Japan about the 12-or-so Japanese citizens abducted to North Korea until Japan changes it's laws and allows hundreds of foreign parents access to their children abducted to Japan by Japanese parents over the decades. So long as "foreigners" are viewed as violent, and fathers as unnecessary; as long as Japanese mothers can play to these stereotypes and evidence of such behavior is not required (or even desired) in Japanese family courts; so long as law enforcement fails to enforce "scary" visitation rights; men, especially foreign men, will be denied access to their children. "But Japan is such a good place to raise kids!" the rallying cry goes up. Yeah, if you consider it a healthy family where one person lives in fear of having their children abducted. |
| Today is children's day in Japan. On top of that, it was our last day off as a family for I don't know how long. To make the most of it, we packed up our picnic gear and drove up into the mountains to a riverside camp area we've visited few times before. Beautiful weather and cool water. Son and I searched the river for fish. We had lunch under a tree. Afterward, we went fishing (caught one) with wife, played catch and soccer, and even got the kite up though there wasn't any wind to speak of. Took a nap. Son is coughing a bit. Wife is in the kitchen now, making dinner. I am tired. Tomorrow I have to work all day (5:30 a.m. to may 9 p.m., with breaks during the day). Golden Week in Japan is over. I feel good, just tired. This month is my month to revise stories and submit them--no new stories will be written. |
| On Sunday, I came home in the afternoon following a few hours at work to the announcement that we, the family, would be leaving for the movies in an hour and the following day going to the amusement park, Space World. My first thought was "fun"; my second was "where are we getting the money?" So I asked the wife and she told me not to worry. So I didn't. We watched "Alice in Wonderland" while son what "Crayon Shinchan". Honestly, I think I would've laughed more and had a better time if I'd followed my instincts and stuck with son--"Alice" failed to impress. We watched it in 2D because the wife wanted to hear it in English, but the movie was obviously conceived and made for 3D. So, we prepare for the next day's trip, get everything ready: breakfast, lunch to take, directions and all that. Sleep. Wake up. Get dressed. Just about get out the door, and the wife says she doesn't want to go now. She got upset with son and now doesn't feel like going. I call her spoiled and tell her to get in the car. Of course, I then give her the option of staying or going--it's up to her. I will manage either way, but I am pissed. She decides to go. Reluctantly she gets in the car, sighing all the way. Things go downhill quick. I won't get into the details, but 15 minutes later, we are stopped at the side of the road and shouting at one another. I decide to press on. What follows are two hours of high-speed silence. We arrive and its as if nothing happened. It's a bright, warm day; the park is full of people; son is excited, though nervous because the wife is still sullen at times with him and me. But we press on. First ride: Black Hole Scramble. This is kind of a kiddy roller coaster in the dark, but it was a good start. Second: Titan V. This would be son's first time on a big roller coaster. He isn't scared. We spend over an hour standing in line, people watching and dancing around the topic of "what the hell was that this morning in the car?" Even as we sit down and buckle-up, son isn't scared. It's a hell of a fun ride: the kind that starts with a long plunge followed by several twists and turns. Son isn't scared at all. I figure he shouldn't be, not after living with his mother and me. Time for lunch. We are okay, it seems, the wife and me, joking and having a good time after the thrill of the roller coaster. Third ride: A big water slide for son and I. I stand in line, in the hot sun (the top of my balding head is sunburned) while son runs back and forth between giving me snacks and his mother sitting under a shade studying English. The ride is short but fun, and refreshing because we get splashed a lot. It is here that I notice most of the warning and instruction signs are written in bad English. Why don't they just as ask a native speaker to check them before putting the damn things up? I'm sure at least one person would do it for free. Fourth: roller coaster, backwards. Son is not scared, but getting tired. Fifth: Venus. Fast, whirling, roller coaster. Son would not ride. Wife is disappointed in him. I'm getting my temper back. Wife and I ride together. It is exciting and fun. Son is happy when we come back. Sixth: Alien Panic, for son and wife. I go off to ride The Zaturn: the tallest ride in the park, it's been beckoning wife and I (she really is braver at these sorts of things than I) all day. After forty minutes in line, the high-speed climb and descent lasts only ten seconds. Argh. Not scary. Barely exciting. I go stand in Alien Panic line with son while wife goes off to Zaturn. Here I meet a mother and her children. She is originally from Peru but has been in Japan for 19 years. We all chat together, son included. Eventually, wife returns, and the three of us go through Alien Panic. Nothing at all to panic about, really. The most boring attraction thus far. Afterward we let son play on a big bouncy area with lots of other kids. Later, get souvenirs and then drive home. Wife insisted on taking a turn at the wheel, but after 15 minutes, she is conked-out in the passenger seat while son sleeps in the back. I drive, pleased that she at least smiled a few times that day, and son had a great time. I had fun, too. But I couldn't stop thinking about the things that happened in the morning. I thought we had patched things up pretty well recently. The cracks are still showing, it seems. I don't think or do, except to press on and hope for the best. More standing in line follows. It takes a minmum |
| Yesterday was an interesting and hungover day. The night before, I went to a book exchange party with a few of the local teachers--Japanese and non-Japanese as well. It was great fun in it's own geeky sort of way, and I got a whole bag of new books I am just dying to read. However, we drank a lot cheap wine during the party and then made our way to a bar where we drank more beer and cocktails. My friend there discussed a story of mine with me--which turned into a group discussion on the use of grammatical correct dialogue to show events of the 90's, and it made me feel really old: "I don't remember the 90's," one person said, "I was too young. But you were there, so you should know what they talked like." Waking up at 6 a.m., I had a terrible hangover and only a few hours sleep. Wife had to be out the door before the kid at 7:30 a.m., so it was a busy start. After they left, I had a lot of cleaning and chores to do around the house and neighborhood. I finished all of them as quick as I could so that I could take a nap, wake up and have the afternoon for writing. It wasn't to be. I took the nap and made my lunch, but just as I was eating, son walks in the front door and demands to know why I didn't meet him in front of the school. Turns out, they finished early that day (no one told me). Well, that was cool in it's way. He did his homework while I finished lunch, and then we went to the park near the building where I would teach an English lesson at 3:30. We got about an hour's practice playing catch and soccer, and then went inside. No one else showed up for the English lesson, so I taught son English for about 20 minutes, and he surprised me yet again with how well he can speak if he's focused on it. After that, we went to his daycare to talk to the teachers about a little incident with son and a girl ending with a pencil being stabbed into his calf. They were playing around and "somehow" the pencil got shoved in there. It was so obvious he was trying to protect her from punishment that my heart melted with how cute it was--but I will talk to him about the inadvisability of protecting a woman who won't own up to stabbing you in the leg. I let him play with the other kids for about an hour. I went to the store, but on the way stupidly banged my head into a low-hanging street sign and cut my forehead open. Remember, kids: head wounds bleed the worst. Despite my best efforts to clean up the blood and stop the bleeding, I had an angry gash on my forehead as I stepped into the local supermarket to pick up some popcorn. I did my best to keep that side of my head from view, but the lady at the register gave me a worried look. It took the daycare teachers a bit longer to catch on. After I’d returned, I spent a few minutes watching the kids play. Finally, one of the teachers came over and pointed at my head with this look on her face like: “We just saw you five minutes ago!” Slightly embarrassed, I explained what happened. After another half hour or so, son and I went back home. He played in the living room while I made yakisoba. After dinner, I went back to the grocery store because I’d forgotten to buy milk. When I got back, son was proudly standing there in his pajamas, his hair soaking wet, his face running with water. “Finished,” he proudly proclaimed, meaning he’d taken a bath in the five minutes I’d been gone. Later, we prepared for the next day’s school and then watched a TV movie he’d been wanting to watch for a long time (we’d recorded it). Mom came home at 8:30 p.m., ate dinner, took a bath, and then we all went to be at 9:30 p.m. Exhausted, but happy with the pleasant day, I fell asleep almost immediately, only to be woken up at 11:30 by a phone call. A friend of mine runs a local ESL school. We’d gone out for drinks the other night, and I’d told him that his employee had another part-time job working the same school as I did. I’ve known my friend for about ten years, and I owed nothing to his employee—a man in his forties who, instead of trying to drum up business for my friend, his employer, was drumming up his own private students—and felt it would be better to let him know straight up what was going on. Well, after talking to me, he faxed his employee to ask what was going on. It took the guy two days to call back! My friend fired him then. I got all of this in a drunken phone call at 11:30 p.m., and reassurances not to worry, that he hadn’t said who’d let him know about the part-time work (I hadn’t told my friend about his employee taking his own private students). I felt a bit of a heel, but I owe this guy many, many favors. Sounds a bit like organized crime, doesn’t it? Today is just as busy, with son’s teacher coming to visit, necessitating a full cleaning of every room him might conceivably see. I have a huge scab on my forehead and have to teach for six hours today. Fun. |
| I teach ESL at four elementary schools in the Kudamatsu city area. Yonegawa, way up in the mountains, with its beautiful scenery and only 9 students enrolled in the entire school, is the only school whose offer of eating lunch with the students I accepted. After two hours of teacher-led English instruction, one hour of which, as per the teacher's recommendation, we played Uno in English, the three boys constituting the entire 5th grade led me back to their classroom. On the way, a group of three girls (whom I guess made up the 4th grade), popped their heads out of their classroom and asked me where I came from. I answered their question in Japanese and they giggled. The smallest of the three got a strange look on her face then. Looking me up and down, she exclaimed in a disappointed voice: "He dresses like my father." Well, their went the "cool foreign guy" moniker. The boys' classroom looked like all the other classrooms in Japan I've visited: simple, utilitarian, walls covered in educational pictures, posters, calendars and schedules, walls, shelves and desks all looking heavily used and needing a new paint job but not getting it as "that teaches children to make do with what they have." After refusing several times, I sat at the big desk at the front of the room while they arranged four smaller desks in circle with mine. The boys dressed in their white aprons and caps and went to the kitchen to get the trolley of food for lunch. Today's lunch would be a bowl of steaming cream and vegetable soup with quails eggs, cold potatoes coated with sesame seeds, a bread roll, half an orange, and a small bottle of milk. The boys carefully served the food, spending a lot of time over the soup because they wanted to fill the bowls as full as they could. As we ate, we asked each other a few questions. The teacher ate with us and helped me understand a few of the more difficult questions. As it turned out, the two brothers lived about 10 kilometers up the road and road the bus to school, while the other boy lived just across the field (he pointed to his windows) with his four brothers, parents and grandparents. Only the teacher ate the traditional Japanese breakfast daily: rice and miso soup. They were amazed that students in the U.S. have three months off for summer vacation. "What do they do?" "Not much," I answered. "It depends, though." "They do homework then, right?" "No homework." "Really??" There was a definite tone of disbelief, almost pity, in their voiced surprise. How do they get by with wasting three months of the school year? Did I mention that the teachers' office had a big gas stove burning in the middle of the room to fight off the mountain chill? Well, as we ate, I found myself, dressed in a long sleeved shirt with an undershirt, wishing the classroom had a similar stove (and not for the first time. The situation is the same in schools throughout Japan: no heaters in the classroom so that the children toughen up and don't expected extravagance.) "Do students in America wear uniforms?" "Usually, no. Some schools require them, but most don't." I looked at the three boys sitting their in their short-sleeved shirts and shorts, not one of them showing the least sign of being cold, and added: "But you can't wear shorts to school in America." "What? Not even in summer?" "We don't have school in summer, remember?" "Oh, yeah. Well, it sounds really uncomfortable." I really wanted these kids to shiver a little. Really, I did. I wanted to stop feeling that I had grown up in a system that, compared to this Japanese one, produced a kid (me) unwilling to put up with a little discomfort. Come on, kids, I wanted to say, I know its cold in here. I know you're cold. Just show it. Make me feel better. I wanted to ask them about the three videos in their VHS collection about the Hiroshima atomic bombing. But I didn't, and they smiled as they had the whole time. We finished our lunches and laughed at one of the boys who'd had the hardest time eating his orange. I thanked them for the meal and said I had to go. "Until next time." "Certainly," I said, a little sadly because I knew I wouldn't return for another month. |
| Yesterday was my first day of teaching at Yonegawa elementary school. I had visited the school once before, and was impressed by it. Yonegawa school is up in the mountains, far the the towns and factories. At the beginning of spring, it is surrounded by valley walls carpeted in green cedar trees and bamboo leaves. The air is clean and smells of earth. It's quiet, too, with only a few cars hissing down the road at the edge of town. The school itself is amazing: beautifully landscaped with carefully manicured trees in the Japanese style and a small, rock-lined pond which, on this day, was rippling with rain drops. I'd arrived an hour early, mistaking the start time of the two lessons I would be teaching, but, having spied a temple stairway just up the road, decided to take advantage of the extra time to stretch my legs and take a look around. The rain was falling steadily, but there was no wind and the morning was warm. I grabbed my umbrella and set my cellphone to silent mode. Once I got to the foot of the stairs, I saw the climb was much steeper and farther than I'd expected. The gray-green rough steps stretched a hundred feet up away into the trees on the side of the hill. I grinned, welcoming the exercise, unsure what I would find at the top. Stopping every fifty feet or so to snap a picture of the surrounding panorama of terraced rice paddies, raging river and steep hills trailing whisps of slow-moving clouds I drank in the smell of green, while on either side of the stairway and amazing array of plants, trees and fungi seemed to pull me back in time. About fifty feet up from a branching path that led off to a cleared terrace filled with gravestones the stairway ended at a small, roofed gateway bracketed by statues of demon-dog guardians. In the perfect quiet of a sylvan forest, the wooden temple, decorated with only two knotted ropes and two Shinto folded paper streamers hanging from the front eaves seemed to stand me back four hundred years. The only token to modernity was a single electric switch at the top of the gate's room--and I wasn't sure that was even connected. I bowed in respect to the temple and any priest that might've been surprised to look out the window and find some strange white guy standing at the entrance to the grounds. Stepping carefully around puddles, I took a closer look at the stone lanterns and basins collecting rainwater. In surrounding leaves shone a brilliant light green with the cloud-filtered morning light, casting the whole scene is a soft, warm glow. Completing my circle of temple, I returned to the roofed gateway and stood there with for a long time, maybe ten minutes, with my eyes closed, drinking in the sound of rain dripping on the roof, the leaves, and the distant sound of the river racing away, willing my body to breath deep and steadily, trying desperately to empty my mind of all its concerns and hopes. That done, I went to one of the stone basins and washed my face in the cool, clear rainwater, remembering as I did the little basins of holy water at the churches of my youth and how dirty and warm they'd always seemed. As I rubbed my face dry, I remembered entering my first temple in Japan all those years ago and being reminded by the smell of my grandparents' barn in Idaho, and feeling at home. I'm still not sure if I believe in reincarnation, but something about these temples speaks to my heart in a way that no christian church ever could. I could revel in the magnificent artwork and architecture of the the great Catholic cathedral of Antwerp, but it's stone felt cold and vain to me: the wooden temple recognizes time and that all things that rise fall back to the earth. The stone markers, bowls, and lanterns, too, will be washed away in the rain of millennia, and the wooden temple structure reminds viewers of that. Cleansed, I returned, taking each narrow step carefully, savoring the metaphor of descending back to the mundane world. The time had come to enter the school and teach English. I'd arrived during classes, so when I got to the teacher's common office, I found only one teacher there. She showed me a desk that would be mine while there (a big, wonderful and welcome surprise). The inside of the school, and especially the teacher's room, looks like something plucked out of a hundred years ago: all the walls are wooden and the place has that warm smell of cut, aged timber. The posters, signs, mottos, warning signs, cleaning rotas, duty boards, schedules and calendars all looked old, yellowed by heat and humidity. A single gas heater burned in the middle of the room, a big, brass kettle of water steaming at its top. After several minutes of chit chat and looking around, I found the board listing the number of students by grade: 2nd grade, 3 students; 4th grade, 3 students, 5th grade, 3 students. 9 students in all the school. Five teachers, and myself, once or twice a month. The English class had three students, all fifth graders, all boys, two of them being brothers. The mood was so casual, so informal, we couldn't do anything but have fun; in fact, the second hour, as approved by the teacher, was to play Uno in English, and judging by the worn state of the cards, I guessed they'd played this game quite often as a regular part of their English studies. More details of lesson content and lunch next time. |
| Sitting in the principal's office at the elementary school I teach at the other day when the principal pops in for a friendly chat. We speak in Japanese. He asks me how long I have been in Japan. He is surprised when I say ten years, because he thought it was only a year. The teacher I just worked with comes in to join us. We talk about my son's English ability (again, they are surprised that he doesn't speak English), and talk about the particular difficulties of Japanese children learning English in Japan. The meeting ends with the principal asking if my wife is Japanese. She is, I say. It's nice, isn't, he says with a leer and a laugh: the implication quite clear that Western men like Japanese women, and that's why I came to Japan or that's why I married my wife. I wanted to slap him. I hate that stereotype: Western men come to Japan to get a Japanese wife. I wanted to tell him that I married my wife because she is beautiful and intelligent. I said, I'm glad she is a woman, yes. He said, But she's Japanese, right? She's a woman, yes. The other teacher must've picked up on the mood, because he stood up and said it was time for the next lesson. He was right. Always, there is a lesson to teach and learn. |
| It might look like things are improving in my life, but I am not sure. I have three part time jobs teaching English at various schools in the area, and I run my own business, but I don't make enough money to pay my bills. I have until the end of the month to come up with some magical way of preventing one of my student loans from defaulting. I've already told them I don't have any money to spare, and they said there was nothing more they could do. They have been patient enough. What a crock. My coworker at Nova (one of the schools I teach at, and hate) announced he's going back to Australia in a month. Since then, the management has gotten more insistent and demanding.I am sad he's leaving because he was the only native English speaker I could speak to, though only once a week. Son and I had another fight about my lack of Japanese and his lack of patience. I am teaching him how to play chess, and I won't let him win. He likes winning, and cried that he hasn't yet been able to beat me. I told him that he won't be able to do that for a long time. On the up side, it looks like I might be getting a contract to write a textbook on financial English. Not sure yet, but it looks promising. Hoping. Meanwhile, I am working 50 hours a week, 7days a week. 50 hours a week and not able to pay bills? Got a Master's degree? Oodles of experience? Someone's getting shafted. I know I should be grateful to have work and money--but, somehow, I just can't bring myself to feel that way because I know I am getting used by people with a lot more money than I, people who are wringing as much out of me as they can for as little pay as possible. And I am tired. But I can't rest. I can't even take a day off. Son is wonderfully understanding about the little time I get to spend with him now. I hate that. I want to buy him a bicycle because he won the essay writing competition for first graders in the whole prefecture--but I can't because we just don't have enough money. I wake and start writing at 5 a.m., and I finish work, usually, by 8 p.m. each day. Is this fair? Yes, I guess so. It's all my own fault for not making the right decisions. It's my own fault for getting an education. No, I don't really think that way. It's just me being ironic. And tired. |
| Got home at 9:30 p.m. last night. Left the house at 8:45 a.m. Busy day. Wife and son were still awake. They had just gotten home a half-hour before me. Such is life in Japan sometimes. I quickly took a bath, ate some prepackaged spaghetti and a rice ball, and then went to bed. I'd played with the idea of waking up and working on a story, but was just too tired to seriously consider it. Yesterday morning, I taught at my first public school. Working with the computerized blackboard didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped, and I wasn't able to communicate with the teacher as well as I might, but the kids didn't seem to mind. Two hours with a foreigner in class seemed to please about 80% of the class. A few glitches in my self-introduction, however, caused the teacher and I to have to go into a huddle during the 15 minute break: "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" she asked. "No." "But you showed a picture of about forty people and said it was your family." "In America, we have a different sense of family than you do in Japan. Family is not defined by household members. Oh, and when the students saw a picture of my son, they said, 'Half!' I don't like that word." "Why not?" "I understand that in Japan it is acceptable to refer to people of mixed ancestry as "half," but the connotation in English, is "half-human". I don't like the term, and it is offensive." "Of course. I understand. But Japan looks like just one people--" "The media sure shows it that way--" "Yes. But the children don't realize the difference. There aren't many foreigners here." "My son is not a foreigner. He is Japanese. That's why I didn't respond to the children about my son." Well, that was the sense of a conversation in bad Japanese and bad English, but we got our points across. Regardless, it was a good start. Today is Thursday. I have a lesson at 11 a.m., a lesson at 2 p.m., and then teach at a company from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. In between times, I need to write an article on diesel fuel, try to finish a chapter of a story I'm working on or a finish a draft of an other story. Busy day. Now I have to go and deliver my son's clothes to the after-school daycare and then go shopping for coffee and bread. It is 9:20 a.m. The busy days have started again. |
| Yesterday was my only day off of the week (well, pseudo-day off). I spent the morning and afternoon writing. At 3:15 I meet son outside of school to take him and two classmates to my English lesson. I've started teaching a lesson for 1st through 3rd graders at the local community center just across the street from the elementary school, once a week, for $5 a kid per lesson, though the first lesson is free. It's mostly just a way of getting kids (and their parents) interested in taking my other, real English lessons. Well, unfortunately, the two classmates backed out of the idea before the end of school, so son and I went to the lesson room together. Mom was out of town, at university, and wouldn't get back until 8:30p.m. I planned on he and I having a nice, fun evening together, so but start with an English lesson. We got about five minutes into it before another girl and her mother showed up, wanting to join. "No problem." So, the girl joined, and son was happy. She asked him if he spoke English, and he said, quite confidently, that he did. As we went through the games and the English, I noticed that son had a tendency to tell the girl the answers before she had a chance to think of it for herself. I tried to keep him from doing that. It resulted in a strange dynamic. Not sure how it'll turn out. Odd teaching your own child. The rest of the evening went very well. He watched a DVD while I prepared dinner. After, we played a video game together (and he beat me so bad). We took a bath, and then played some board games until mom came home. It was a good night. Even though we had some flare-ups over misunderstandings and miscommunications, we managed them. As I said before, with the wife back in school, I am afraid the bad old days of son and I getting angry at one another over communication difficulties returning. Last night, however, went well enough, so I can only hope it is a good sign of things to come. |
| As you may know, was trying to get a teaching job with the local school board, to teach English at local elementary schools. The pay was good, and the hours perfect; sadly, the job didn't materialize. I was disappointed about that. What enraged me, however, was the reason. It is no exaggeration to say that I am the most highly qualified teacher of ESL in the area. My resume is impeccable. The people they usually get for the job are recent university graduates with no teaching experience. I've been teaching for 15 years, have an M.A. in English, am a published writer and have significant experience in curriculum development. Yet, the school board chose to go with another candidate. The reason for this choice was immediately clear: the wanted to hire someone from a dispatch company (in this case, Interact). Dispatched workers are cheaper all around because the school board doesn't have to pay insurance on them or worry about how to acclimate to the job and Japan--all of that is the responsibility of the dispatching company, and they rarely worry about it, either. There are several other factors, but in the end what the schools get is a lower quality teacher, the teacher gets a lower quality position, and the dispatch company more profit. It sucks all around. Oh, and its illegal. But everyone ignores that. So, I am going to write an anonymous letter (in Japanese) to the school board, complaining that they have hired an illegal teacher to teach my son English (my son is in the local schools, after all), and that I am very concerned about the presence of foreigners working illegally in our public schools. I will send a copy to the national Board of Education as well. The thing that really pisses me off, though, is that I will probably meet this dispatch teacher some night, drinking, and find that he just doesn't care about the situation. Just so long as he/she is getting paid, who cares? Well, I do. Unfortunately for me, I have values that do no end at making money. I have been scraping by all my damn life and, yes, I'm tired of it, but I stick to my values whenever possible (and, frankly, I haven't yet run into a situation where I've had to discard those few values). One of those values is trying to improve the working conditions of employees, because I know (I studied business for three and a half years at university) that companies will do everything in their power to squeeze as much as possible from an employee--it's an inherently unfair situation, but there's no reason we can't make it better. So, I'm angry. I've got a huge chip on my shoulder. And I'm smiling. I like that chip. It makes me me. |
| Today, son began his second year of elementary school. Things have been going well between us in terms of communication, but I am afraid that has mostly been because mother is here to help. Tomorrow, she starts going to university again. I'm hoping the bad days of miscommunication and frustration don't immediately return. We are trying. I am also hoping that my new job teaching at elementary schools will improve my Japanese ability so that son and I have an easier time understanding one another. Just nervous, I guess. Last night, he slept alone for the first time since he was born. If you didn't already know, children in Japan tend to sleep with their parents until a much later age than what Americans are comfortable with. In the case of son, it was until 7 years old. This was due to limited space: we don't have a separate bedroom. We all sleep on the floor in the living room, which doubles as his room, our dining room and bedroom. I was eager to get him out of our futon, and finally, yesterday, we figured out a new way to rearrange out sleeping positions to make that possible. Finally. God, that took a long time. |
| Enoura, like Yonegawa, is a small school located far from the city center. Enoura, however, sits halfway up a cliff overlooking the sea, on a small island out in the bay. In most situations, this would give the school and its students a beautiful ocean view to enliven their days. Unfortunately for Enoura, they overlook a huge ship yard. So strange. Yonegawa and Enoura lie withing a half-hour's drive of one another, but whereas Yonegawa is isolated in a little mountain valley, Enoura overlooks the sea and a huge factory complex. Such is the geography of Japan. The road to Enoura is a windy little one-lane affair circling the island. "You'll have to be careful in winter," the coordinator warned me. Having grown up for a large part of my life in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., I7m not particularly bothered by driving in snow or ice, but the prospect of slipping off the road and plunging a hundred feet into the ocean beneath does present one with caution. The teachers at Enoura are all shy but kind and eager to start teaching. I get the feeling they're a bit isolated out there on their little island, and eager for input from outside; probably all 10 students feel the same. The principal is an older man who seems like he'd be more at home in a pub than a school, but he was friendly and tried speaking English to me. The biggest question they had for me was whether I wanted to drink coffee, tea, or Japanese tea (I told them anything is fine). Just like at all the other schools, the awards cabinet is full of plaques, medals and trophies--and more paintings by the children. Enoura is proud, they said, of their high-ranking students. They wished me luck, and I did them. The next day, I visited the last of the schools I will be teaching at: Toyooi. Toyooi is near Hanaoka, close to the city center. It, too, has very few students. Toyooi is unexceptional in terms of location or building, but the head English teacher there seems very, very keen; very, very busy; and very, very shy. Not the best combination, and it promises a lot of extra management on part. Also, I will be teaching the teachers English about 6 hours per year--not problem, but it wasn't something I expected. We spent a lot of time discussing potential classroom techniques and how to contact me about lesson updates. I felt Toyooi was the most interested in getting the most out of my abilities and time. Nice. My first lessons will be at Toyooi on the 14th. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
