My New Camera!

I bought a beautiful new Canon Kiss (known as Canon Rebel) SLR camera last week, and there's not much point in having it if I don't use it.  So here my batch of random, trying-to-figure-out-camera-settings pictures, taken at Wakamiya Hachiman-Guu Shrine in Nirasaki.

My favorite picture I took that day.

This awesome dude was guarding the water you're supposed to wash your hands in to purify; however, as there was a thin film of ice on the water at 12:30 in the afternoon, I opted to skip that step.

Fortunes all tied up.

One Year!

It's officially been a year since I arrived in Japan.

How time flies.  And, at the same time, how time drags.  I simultaneously feel as though I haven't been here long at all, and as though I have been here forever.

I have learned so much--or, perhaps, I have had a lot of things that I thought were true confirmed.  For example, I can survive without my family.  I knew this already, or else I wouldn't have come here in the first place, but it is nice to have my ability to live semi-independently confirmed.

I have learned that looking like an idiot will not kill me.  I am fairly certain that I look like an idiot (definitely an oddity) on a daily basis.  But, thanks to the "foreigners are guests" attitude in Japan, I have only been mocked for it a few times.  I am sure that this attitude would drive me insane if I lived here for too long, but after a year, it's still quite nice.

I have learned more Japanese.  There is nothing profound about this, really.

I can be happy and content with my life and myself.  This was the big shocker, really, as I've struggled with depression and anxiety since high school (and probably before).  I think that school is just an unhealthy environment for me, because I expect myself to be smart, do well, and have things come easily to me.  And when they didn't, or when I failed to live up to my own expectations of awesomeness, I couldn't really deal.  Here, in the semi-real world (I would not claim that living in a foreign country and teaching English is as hard as having a real job in the US), I can just try my best and be content that I am doing a good job.  There is accountability, but there is not the same looming, overwhelming terror of failing.

And yet, I must also remind myself that much of this is an illusion, and is a part of the reason why some people end up settling down here permanently.  I am special in Japan, for no other reason than that I am  a foreigner--and not just any foreigner, but a white, blue-eyed foreign female.  It is very, very easy to be seduced by this feeling; people are more interested in what I have to say.  My adult students have almost all asked me if I have a boyfriend, and then demanded to know why not, when I'm "so cute" (let it be noted that I am average-looking).  Just today, I was an object of much attention and astonishment when I went to a student's high school culture festival.  I am special, just by being me.

But, horrible and ego-inflating as this "special foreigner feeling" can be, I think it might be good for me, as long as I can remember, at the end of the day, that it is nothing more than a temporary cultural illusion.  I have never felt special, or unique, or talented (well, I knew I was smart growing up, but that was about it).  And, well, if feeling good about myself is a habit I can get into while living in this mysterious land of foreigner-fascination, maybe it's something I can keep up when I eventually get back home.

To sum up the long-winded post: holy cow!  I have been here for a year, and survived!

And now, a picture of two tenth-grade boys with pink T-shirts alien headbands, taken earlier today.  Just because, well, this did not strike me as odd until after the fact.  And that is a true sign that I have been here for a year.

Around the Neighborhood

I have bemoaned the fact that I am not a photographer for quite some time; it seems that I never take enough pictures.  I live in a foreign country, and will not be here forever, so I really ought to be capturing as many scenes of my life here as possible!  A few pictures from my general "neighborhood" thus follow!

Mr. Cat (or Lord Meowington III) lives at a house near my apartment.  He is, quite possibly, the most ancient cat in the world, but always appreciates a scratch when I'm walking by.

Post offices are everywhere in Japan.  Everywhere.  I can only assume that this is because post offices also offer banking and insurance services, and because Japan post office workers would rather die than have a line fifteen people deep like the post office in my old town often had.  The larger post offices can be quite nice, but the smaller ones, like this one near my apartment, tend to be very small, a little dingy, and offer very speedy service.

Church on the way to work.  I suppose that I should go--I'm not sure, but I think it's rather remarkable that I have a church so close to my apartment--but all the services are in Japanese, and I'm too picky about my religion to go and listen to a service if I'm not sure that I agree with it.

The small, dingy river near my apartment, not to be confused with the large, somewhat-dingy river that's also near my apartment.  Normally, this river is not so high or wide, but June's the rainy season.  You can't see it in the picture, of course, but the river was moving along at a really fast clip; that duck sped on by without paddling at all.

Bad staff need not enter.  (This is actually a door to an old, narrow, tall, creepy building right next to the small river.  I have no desire to find out what's on the other side.)

Life Goes On...

So, besides two delightful bouts of illness in the last two weeks, nothing exciting is going on here in Japan.  We did have a typhoon yesterday, which was only about a Category 2 Hurricane--nothing to write home about for a former Houstonian, except that I had to bike a good 30 minutes to and from work in the pouring rain yesterday.  And got sick and puked in a storm drain on the way back.

I suppose the main excitement is that family members will be coming to visit in two weeks!  My father, little sister, and step-mom will all be arriving in Tokyo on July 4th, and I'll be meeting them in Kyoto on July 6th for a short, no doubt intensive, weekend vacation.  I've been to Kyoto before, but there are some things on my father's "to see" list that are new to me, so I'm excited for that.  And, heck, I'm mostly just thrilled that the family's coming.

It also may officially be summer in Japan, as I turned on my air conditioner for the first time earlier today.  Again, I was sick, and the eighty-five-degree weather just wasn't really helping things along.

Rice fields are also being planted, which I guess is a sign of the upcoming summer.  Below are pictures of a rice field I walk by every Monday on my way to the branch school, and which I thought would be cool to record as the plants grow throughout the season.  Rice farming is still very fascinating to me--the idea of growing a crop that requires constant flooding is just bizarrely interesting.

May 28th

June 11th

June 18th

June 5th was the day after my delightful one-person bicycle crash, so my boss spoiled me by driving me to the branch school (about 40 minutes away) instead of making me hobble from the train station.  Hence, there is no picture for that day.

Junior High...

It sucks, for lack of a better word (sorry, Mom).  I keep thinking, when I get back home, I want to get my teaching certification for elementary or high school.  But not junior high.  They are in the midst of so many adolescent, hormone-driven mood swings that there's no way I could manage it.  Plus, junior high was, in short, a living hell for me, when I realized that people could be needlessly mean and tear down others for no reason.

Luckily, at my current job, I teach a whopping three junior high classes per week.  We'll call them Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, for reasons you can probably guess.

Monday: Usually, my most enjoyable of the three.  Two seventh-grade boys and an eighth-grader, who are generally upbeat, enthusiastic, and extremely rowdy.  One of the three is an unbelievably sweet kid, who works to keep the other two in line; one is the always-enthusiastic "monkey" who brings up the energy level of the class; the last is a decent kid, who is likely very, very good at math.  I don't mean that last part as an insult; their English is quite good on the whole, but the last kid excels at the formulaic, memorization-based part of class, while the other two are much better at creatively putting together questions and statements using vocabulary and grammar patterns they already know.

Tuesday: The middle of the three.  Two seventh-grade boys and one seventh-grade girl, all of whom are nice kids.  They are generally less enthused than the Monday class, probably because they go to EIKEN (a standardized English test) practice immediately after my class finishes, but they participate, try hard, and enjoy themselves.  I think the classroom atmosphere got a bit thrown off because a new teacher (me) came in three months ago, and then Boy #2 joined the class six weeks later.  There seems to be a lot of shyness going on, especially from the one girl; I had class with just her one day, and we had a blast.

Thursday: An extremely frustrating class of four uber-cool junior high students who simply cannot be bothered with caring, putting forth effort, or enjoying themselves, and one poor sixth-grade (still in elementary school) girl who tries hard, is quite intelligent, and is slowly having her spirit crushed by her much more awesome peers.  I am quite sure that one of the seventh-grade girls plots, on average, eight and a half different ways to kill me over the course of every fifty-minute class.  Seriously, when you find my body, don't believe the suicide note--ask for the evil-eyed girl in my Thursday class.  The other teachers will know which one you're talking about.  Some sense of validation was given at the last staff meeting, when I asked for teaching ideas, and almost all of the suggestions were shot down by their former teacher as being impossible.

But today, today, the Monday class went horribly wrong.  The "monkey" student--he was given that name by my boss, not me--decided three minutes in to class that everything was much too boring, and he had to leave.  Which he did.  He was pretty clearly having a bad day, and the student he usually gets along with was absent,  so he walked out.  I was not going to waste my energy chasing an eighth-grade boy down and dragging him back, so I let him go.  He came back five minutes later, and proceeded to whine that we had started the homework check, which has a point system that leads to rewards, without him.  Thankfully, the sweet kid was there, and he proceeded to shut the monkey down in Japanese.

I have long accepted that I do not have any kind of real authority over these kids.  They pay to go to school here, there is no principal that I can send them to on Mondays, where I teach at our branch school by myself, or detention I can assign them, and I lack the strength of will to scream at them until they listen to me.  Plus, I don't know if it would work, as I (1) am a girl, which makes an even bigger difference here than it would in The States, and (2) cannot yell at them in their native language.  Their English, though good, is not good enough for them to understand what I'm saying if I say like "disrespectful," "unacceptable," or "crush your windpipe with my three-ring binder."

My best guess is this: The Monkey was having a bad day (got dumped, got a bad grade, is experiencing raging hormones, or none or all of the above), walked out of class, got yelled at by his mother when he reached the car, returned to class, and tried (and failed) to get a rise out of his English teacher for forty minutes.

The Monkey clearly does not realize that I used to work with second-grade-girls who locked themselves in bathrooms and four-year-olds who were too willfully stupid to do the "Baby Beluga" dance, even after the class had done it every day for weeks.  He'd have to antagonize a fellow student, start destroying school property, or lunge across the table and try to strangle me to provoke me beyond obnoxiously cheery.  And even then, I could probably take him.  For one, I spend 50 minutes every Thursdays in a class where the one student tries to kill me with her brain.  And, perhaps more importantly, he's pretty puny.

Try harder next week, Monkey!  That is, if my boss doesn't move you to a different class or kick you out of the school when he gets back from his trip to China.  Haha!  You may not listen to me, but you will listen to a fifty-year-old, five-foot-tall Japanese man.  That much I do know.