My quasi-day off

One unfortunate fact of the Japanese work ethic is that they place great value on just showing up, even when there’s not a damn thing to do. See also: today.
Yesterday was a national holiday (敬老の日 – Day of Respect for the Elderly), so everyone was free to do whatever they pleased. I had a plan to drive to Akita City to see a friend or two, but then we received 26 bazillion cm of rain and travel became not exactly safe; Akita City may still be underwater or floating out to the Pacific as I type this. So, I slept in, watched a movie with a friend, and then while channel-surfing we discovered that the autumn sumo wrestling tournament was on, so we watched that for most of the afternoon. There are a surprising number of foreign (not Japanese) wrestlers in sumo these days, I must say. Quite an ass-ton (no pun intended, I swear) of Mongolians, plus a few from Eastern Europe (one of whom I’m pretty sure my friend has the hots for), were in the tournament, even in the upper ranks (ōzeki, 大関). And actually, the two highest ranked guys right now (yokozuna, 横綱) are both Mongolian, although apparently that’s kind of rare. So we sat and cheered and made some tacos and basically did nothing productive all day. It was fabulous.
Getting back to that work ethic thing, though… Sigh. So, school’s still on break today, but I need to show up at the Board of Education anyway, ostensibly to put in a full day’s work. Even the Japanese people in my office, who have the remarkable ability to look busy and/or find work to do in nearly any situation, seemed to understand that we are all in the office today only because not showing up would look bad*. I spent the majority of the morning conducting complicated and exhausting experiments in the fields of physics and aerodynamics with my immediate supervisor. What this really means is that we compared paper airplane designs and tried to see who could keep one airborne the longest, within the confines of the BoE office. She won.

*The Japanese have an inbred fear of or aversion to standing out, in any situation. They even have an expression that translates to, You will be assimi…erm, no, wrong TV show. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Yeah, that’s the one. This (mostly) explains my students’ inability to speak the hell up in class, forcing me the drag the answer out of them with 50 lb. test line even when they know it perfectly well.

The afternoon improved somewhat, as one of the local places we get lunch at when I work at the BoE was able to make some udon spicy enough to singe my nosehairs. I worked for a while on some of my fiction, and by the time I could open my mouth without unleashing gouts of flame I decided to go for a wander. I found a few of my students in the BoE building’s common area playing Final Fantasy: Crisis Core on their PSPs. I of course had to play with their gullibility a bit, so I asked them why they weren’t studying for the English test tomorrow (which there isn’t, of course). They discussed their scores on the last English exam (anywhere from 76% down to 22%) and came to the conclusion that they were hopeless, so they might as well continue trying to beat the White Dragon. Sigh. I do indeed have my work cut out for me.
In slightly more promising news, there was also a group of girls (likewise some of my students) who were actually studying. A few were working on social studies, something about French independence I think, but I didn’t pay too much attention. The rest were engrossed in a ‘bonus project’ for English – nothing I assigned since I hadn’t seen it before. I spent a good hour sitting with them, sipping some hideously sugared coffee and helping when they got stuck on their English project. It mostly involved searching one of their textbooks for translations of unfamiliar expressions, but it kept my attention because unlike the entirety of the New Horizon textbooks we use in class, this one contained useful, [gasp!] relevant expressions. I don’t care if the Japanese government has a steamy love affair with every last page of New Horizon; Ann Green can still go straight to hell – do not pass go, do not collect $200.