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.

Comparisons

Isn't  it lovely when you can only articulate the differences between two things with generalities, and then life goes and gives you a perfect comparison?

My old job: A co-worker fell down the stairs, twisted her knee, and texted my old boss that she couldn't walk and needed to go to the doctor.  Old boss allowed it, but when the doctor declared that former co-worker had no broken bones or sprains, just a really bruised/swollen knee, old boss complained to her that this was a real job that needed to be taken seriously, and she couldn't just take off work and go to the doctor for every little thing.

My current job: I crash my bike and bang up my knee to the point that I can't really walk, then text my boss to let him know that I'm not sure I can get to work tomorrow (Monday's commute: bike 25 minutes, take a train, walk 20 minutes).  Boss calls me back, asks if he needs to take me to the doctor and if I'm okay, and then asks if I'm okay to teach.  I say probably.  He offers to pick me up from my apartment in the morning, and drive me to work--if I'm 100% sure I'm well enough to teach and don't need him to take me to the doctor--and have someone come pick me up and take me home at the end of the day.

Now, my current job does have some stresses that my old job did not, such as a varying commute, fewer holidays, and coworkers who don't really want to socialize with me all that much.  But it's incredibly nice to know that I'm working for someone who understands that things happen in life, and then goes unnecessarily out of his way to help me.

Of course, other benefits include not changing diapers, not potty-training kids, and having adult students who politely pretend to be shocked when they ask me if I have a boyfriend and I respond in the negative.

Solar Eclipse

So, if you hadn't heard, there was a solar eclipse on Monday, and I have the good fortune of living in its direct path.  Hence, pictures.

About a month the event, the special "solar eclipse glasses" were being advertised in my local big-box store's advertisements, but I had no desire to shell out five dollars for a pair, especially since I was not convinced of their effectiveness.  They even had some available at the convenience stores a few weeks before.  According to one of my adult students, though, every store was pretty much sold out of them a week or so before the event.  As it was, I didn't look at it or take pictures until the sun was pretty much totally covered, and it wasn't a big deal--the only thing I can think to compare it to is looking at the moon or stars, where you can see the brightness, but it in no way hurts or strains your eyes.

However, if I start going blind(er than I already am), I'll let you know.

Cherry Blossom Season (Is Over)

Most all of my friends living in Japan have already posted their sakura (cherry blossom) pictures weeks ago; after all, the blossoms have long since fallen off the trees and been replaced by bright green leaves.  However, for a girl who had never knowingly seen a cherry blossoms before, the pictures are still exciting enough to post here, weeks after the fact.

The street that runs from my work to the "big" supermarket

Cherry blossoms at Maizuru Castle

Pathway to a temple near my apartment

Nighttime cherry blossoms at Nirasaki Station

Why, no, I don't know what that lantern says, but it's still cool!

My Garden: Monday, April 16th

Contains:

- 1 cherry tree

- 3 lettuce (2 romaine, 1 red romaine)

- 1 cabbage

- 4 strawberry plants 

- 1 spearmint

- 1 pepper plant

- 2 tulips

- 1 Stargazer Lily

- 1 pansy
- 1 "shiba sakura"
- 3 Glory of the Snow bulbs
- Onions (not yet planted)
- Morning Glory seeds (not yet planted)
- Gladiolus bulbs (not yet planted)

Immediate plans are to get those strawberries in the AWESOME stacking 3-plant pots I got from the 100-yen (dollar) store, get the bulbs planted, and re-pot that poor tree before getting started on everything else.  Oh, and buy more stuff!  It's good that the weather is so gorgeous right now, because I am definitely getting into this miniature garden thing.

Life: Changed

Well, how time flies.

Since my last post, I have moved across four prefectures to my new apartment, new job, and new life in Yamanashi.  I still teach small children, but I am no longer a glorified babysitter; no offense meant, of course, to those who find their calling working with very young children.  One of my older sisters loves doing just that, and I am ever so thankful that she, and other people like her, are fulfilled by and good at that sort of work.  It is an important job; I am just not suited for it.

I am still in the process of getting settled in, even though I've been here for almost a month now.  My new apartment was empty when I arrived, and the furniture I received from my predecessor was rather minimal--plus I am currently in a bit of a financial crunch (moving across four prefectures and all).  I slept on the floor and lived out of suitcases for that first week, though, so everything is an improvement when compared to that.

Overall, I would say that things are going very well.  I like my new co-workers and my new boss, even if, as the only girl, the only person at the company younger than thirty, and the only person not co-habitating with a Japanese woman, I am the odd one out.  I like my classes fairly well, and even though they only meet for an hour once a week, and I have far more students than I did before, I feel like I am already getting to know the kids a little bit.

If I had to say that there was one part of the job that I do not enjoy as much, it would be, oddly, working with the adults.  It is something that I was greatly looking forward to, but now that it has happened, I feel out of my depth and a little overwhelmed with it all.  This feeling of uncertainty can almost definitely be attributed to the fact that I just don't have any experience doing it, so it requires more effort, but still offers more uncertainty and requires more trial and error.  Neither of those things are appealing.  Hopefully, once I get a bit more used to it all, I'll enjoy the adult classes as much as I do the elementary and junior high ones.

Well, that's the general update of it all--I'll try to post some more specific things (like my overhauled '101 in 1001' challenge, for one) as the week goes on.  As it is, I am still alive, and, hopefully, slightly less radioactive than before.

Battles of the Wills

I engage in a battle of the wills at least three times per day.  Sometimes four.  And they are, almost always, the exact same battles.

For the record, I am aware of the sheer banality of every single one of the battles.  Let it serve as a sign of what I spend the majority of my day doing.  If whining about stupid things involving battles with small children that every parent probably face (with the benefit of, y'know, actually loving their children and being able to discipline them appropriately without trying to deal with eight other kids at the same time) will make you think less of me, then please, read no further.

Battle #1
Opponent: Three-and-a-half-year-old boy with what is, unarguably, one of the worst two home life situations at the school.
Frequency of Occurrence: Three times a week, because that's how many days I have lunch duty.  Has been ongoing for months.
The Situation: Will he eat his lunch, now that he's being given a decent meal of rice, meat, and a little fruit instead of the giant slabs of cream-filled bread from the convenience store he used to have every day?
The Victor: Me, though it often takes about an hour and fifteen minutes.  But I always win.  Well, except for once, back when I was new and he dissolved into a fit of screaming hysterical rage that lasted over half an hour until the boss came and took him away.  Call me cruel, but I was totally content to let him scream his little heart out until he passed out.  Hey, I never claimed to be good with children.  I said I liked children in my interview--and I do.  I like the nice ones who have been taught how to behave.

Battle #2
Opponent: The same as listed previously.
Frequency of Occurrence: Constant; ongoing since I arrived.
The Situation: Will he use the toilet?  Yes, a boy who's three years, nine months, is totally and completely not potty trained.  He understand the concept.  He understands that "big boys pee pee in the potty, babies pee pee in diapers."  He can practically change himself.  He just doesn't care, and mom certainly doesn't care enough to try.
The Victor: Him, usually.  I mean, I can only run a child to the toilet every thirty minutes only to be disappointed every single time so many times in a day.  I've basically given this one up.  Mom wants to send her nearly-four-year-old kid to Pre-K in diapers starting in April, let her do it.  And, to be completely fair, Mom has some pretty major issues of her own.

Battle #3
Opponent: A four-year-old slug of a boy
Frequency of Occurrence: Three times a week, lasting from 10:00 - 10:30 (Song & Dance Time)
The Situation: I am the only remaining teacher who does not apply a vastly set of different standards to the boys in baby class than the girls.  I expect the boys to sing and do the dances, just like the girls can.  This boy refuses.  He can do it; he just won't until I call him out, and then does so in a completely minimalist manner until my attention turns elsewhere, at which point he stops again.  This is the same kid who sat crying, crayon-in-hand, for twenty minutes because we wouldn't let him play until he colored one picture on his "Letter N" worksheet.  Ironically, I have this boy's older sister in my elementary class, and she is one of the most energetic, involved students of the lot.
The Victor: It's a stand-off.  The kid doesn't care for me, as evidenced by the fact that during circle time, he always says he's happy because the other teacher is there.  But I refuse to give up, and have started finding ways to punish him, which is working as a motivator ("No good job singing?  No London Bridge for Genki."  Oh, how I hate how stupid I sound.).

Battle #4
Opponent: An eight-year-old girl who comes from the other really horrible home situation, and has been described by her previous and current teachers as, well, a word that's really not nice to use in reference to an eight-year-old.
Frequency of Occurrence: Twice weekly, for an hour and fifteen minutes of pure hell.
The Situation: Will she speak English, or will she blatantly refuse and then respond to threatened punishment in a completely melodramatic way?  I'm going with Option B on this one.  At one point, when I tried to send this student to "time out" for refusing to speak English (turning her back to me and talking in Japanese to her friends, quite literally, within five seconds of my request), she stormed out of the room and locked herself in the bathroom for the remaining 45 minutes of class.  Again, ironically, her younger sister is one of the sweetest kids in the kindergarten class.
Victor: It's hard to tell, and it varies from day to day.  Honestly, this girl is emotionally damaged in a lot of ways, stressed out beyond belief, and has had a truly horrible role model ("Mom hit Dad."  "Your dad hits your mom?"  "No, Mom get angry, and hit Dad so, so much.  Every day.").  It's probably her more often than it is me, just because she thinks she wins, and if I don't decidedly win over her, it's a loss.

Battle #5
Opponent: Myself
Frequency of Occurrence: Varies
The Situation: Will I eventually eventually become dead inside due to my complete lack of sympathy for the little kids who cry because they can't have the toy they want or obsess over having the teacher's attention every moment of every day?  Will I eventually snap at a parent to shut their child up when the parent is speaking to my boss, and the child is whining (in Japanese), "MomMomMomMomLet'sgoMomMomLet'sgoMomLet'sgoLet'sgoLet'sgoMomLet'sgoMomMomMomLet'tsgo" for the entire three minutes while the parent does nothing?  Will I eventually scream at the parents of every male child in the baby class that it is possible to potty-train your son before he's three and a half?  Will I ever scream at my boss that I am a more-than-competent teacher, and even though I'm a female, I will never be as nurturing with the baby class as she wants me to be--at least not without some serious medication for either me or them?  Will I go crazy and tear my own hair out because of the above situations, among many, many others, are a fairly accurate summation of my job that was supposed to be about teaching English?
The Victor: I haven't done any of the things above yet, though I am beginning to wonder about the "dead inside" one.


The Mitigating Factor: I am leaving this job in less than six weeks.  And yes, I will miss all of my first and second-graders (my first and second-graders, not the one aforementioned girl I have twice a week when classes combine).  I will desperately miss a lot of the kindergarteners, mostly because I see them 30 minutes a day, tops, and don't actually have to teach them.  And I will miss getting to establish a rapport with such a small group of kids that I see every day.  But I have no interest in early child care.  None whatsoever.  It frustrates me (clearly).  I do not want to deal with it (clearly).  This job has never been what it was presented as (clearly, or else I wouldn't be here).

Six weeks.  I can keep fighting the battles that much longer, and then it's on to battles that, while may may be just as banal, will at least not involve cleaning a child's poop off the floor.  

Cough, Grumble, Cough...

After a wonderful Christmas break spent participating in a wedding, relaxing at home, and enjoying Hawaii, I'm back in Japan--and have been for over three weeks.  I haven't been posting anything because, well, my other always tried to convince me that I shouldn't say anything if I didn't have anything nice to say.

One of the ongoing annoyances (which is not one of the bigger problems I'm trying not to discuss) is that it seems my immune system/sinuses/whatever cannot handle me working in a germ factory (aka a daycare) while living in the cold Japanese climate.  I was sick for the whole month before Christmas vacation started; within two days of arriving in Houston, I was much, much better.  And two days after work started back up, my illnesses also returned.  I don't know if this is a Japanese thing, a general daycare thing, or just a these-particular-parents thing, but there doesn't seem to be much sense of the idea that if a child has a runny nose that's producing copious amounts of interestingly-colored stuff, plus a hacking cough, it's probably a good idea for them to stay home, especially if one of the parents doesn't have a job or any other kids to look after.  Sordid details of how much snot I've wiped off children's faces over the last two weeks could be shared (and measured in pints, if not quarts), but that would involve having to re-live it.

The weather is also probably not helping.  It has been snowing the last 40 or so hours, non-stop.  My fragile, Texas-coast-raised self is just not prepared to deal with this kind of dry, cold climate, no matter how much hot tea and vitamin C I ingest.  And yes, at some point, even a quiet, gentle snowfall stops being magical and starts being a sloshy annoyance.

And, for interested family members, here's a couple of pictures of me performing my Maid of Honor duties:

I wish the hair wasn't falling in my face, but I love this picture anyways.

Yup, that's the bride, helping to lace up my dress; I may be the worst Maid of Honor ever.