Back in the Game

Proper t’internet access at last! Hey folks, sorry for vanishing for a while but as of tonight I am back and fully hooked up at home to the information superhighway. Hurrah!

The last week and a bit have been very busy for the most part with moving in (my pad – oh yeah, I mean my house! Woo! – was completely unfurnished when I moved in so buying, borrowing or nicking all the appropriate stuff took quite a while. Getting there now although it’s still on the Spartan side), a bit more training and now the actual ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) gubbins.

I’m working at 2 schools in and near Kuji, both High Schools (ages 15-17); today was the third teaching day, my first at the Technical high school; the first 2 were at the ‘Ordinary’ high school, Kuji East. I reckon overall so far I’ve made a pretty good impression. The first day’s lessons were rather difficult as I’d underestimated the individual students’ shyness in front of a group – getting them to answer any questions without significant prepping was hard, so that was a bit frustrating and I was worried things would carry on in the same vein.

Fortunately not however – with an altered lesson structure and more pictures of David Beckham and Harry Potter (the 2 British phenomena the kids seem most enthused by), things have gone smoother since. Boys are noticeably more forthcoming in class than girls, so today’s lessons at the Technical school, of whose student population about 90% are male, were more boisterous but easier to get answers from. All very early doors – I’m not really ‘teaching’ much at the moment, just introducing myself to the students – and it’s very much a learning process, but no disasters and the bits of Japanese I’ve managed in the staffroom seem to be appreciated. The short introductory speech in Japanese I gave before the whole school this morning went ok too, phew!

Conclusions so far:
- Some of what I assumed of Japan appears to be true: the group does indeed hold strong over the individual; people are (almost) unfailingly polite; schoolchildren are miraculously well-behaved compared to their Western counterparts; most of life is organised to an extraordinary extent (the paperwork required to do virtually anything is mind-boggling); they work hard and drive automatics; I am a welcome alien.
- Some of what I assumed is hogwash: technology does not pervade every aspect of life (for every toilet featuring more buttons than the bridge of the starship Enterprise there’s another of the hole-in-the-floor type that any previous visitor to SE Asia will be familiar with; they use cash in large amounts in preference to cards; central heating is shunned and my mornings tend towards the Arctic); a gaijin in the supermarket does not cause swooning and riots, rather indifference from most and the odd inquisitive stare from small children; breaches of etiquette by said gaijin do not result in immediate deportation; bowing has not gone out of fashion; plenty of people don’t read manga.
- There is far more to Japan than it had occurred to me to assume: people are kind, actually kind rather than just polite, to me and to each other; the aesthetic sense is strong in some areas (the packaging of consumer products - beer cans, tissue packets, sweets, cigarettes, cola bottles, stationery - is consistently beautiful) and non-existent in others (most of the buildings could be charitably described as functional in appearance); it is a culture obsessed simultaneously by America and by itself (malls, hiphop, baseball, basketball, obese retail parks, teenagers street-jiving to Little Richard, Di Caprio and Tommy Lee Jones advertising coffee; cheek-by-jowl with cherry blossom updates on the evening news, calligraphy clubs, epic TV soaps on the Japanese Middle Ages, wooden name stamps used to sign all official documents, electronically scanned by some of the most advanced machinery on Earth)
And that’s just two weeks’ worth… Already, it’s safe to say, two of the most extraordinary weeks of my life. More soon.