There is wildlife in my tea!

*shrug* Seemed a better way to start this off than most of the other (cliché) thoughts I had. Said wildlife was actually a special occasion brew. Mornings normally are accompanied here by a cup of green tea from (you guessed it) Tea Lady, but as today is the ceremony of Kosaka Junior High School’s 61st graduating class, we get freaky tea. It was…unique, and not at all in a bad way. It was slightly salty when it first hit my lips, but it quickly faded into a light, almost-but-not-quite sweet aftertaste that made me ponder the meaning of existence for a good few seconds.

I had already been awake for a while by this point, as before coming to school I did some quick interpretation for the mayor because he had some foreign guests who were leaving that morning. So, arrive at school, drink the super tea, and before long the ceremony is under way. I’m not going to waste much space on this – if you’ve seen one graduation ceremony you’ve seen them all, and this one was not in the least bit different. Songs were sung, tears were cried, names were called, etc, etc. We had a few visiting dignitaries including the mayor (hey, long time no see!), the president of the Parent Teacher Mafi…*cough* Association¹, and some alumni who had gone on to lead exciting lives as salarymen…but nothing really worth pooping a brick over. One of them actually had an interesting factoid to share, though: when he graduated from KJH 45 years ago there were over 1000 students here, and his classroom had 55 people (about the size of today’s entire graduating class). This is actually hinting at a much deeper topic, but you’ll have to wait until a future post for that one. Trying to cover it here might result in me writing a four-page tangent.
¹If you work in the Japanese education system, the PTA owns your soul. They influence the school’s budget, the curriculum, and the length of rope you will hang yourself with if you fuck up. Do not defy them or you will be lucky to merely have your kneecaps shattered.

So, the ceremony was…ceremonial, the kids finished signing each others’ yearbooks, and my hand was about to cramp up and fall off. From the start I had been writing a few meaningful sentences to each kid who asked me to sign, and then when they started lining up in droves I of course couldn’t skimp and seem like I was playing favorites, so everyone got a few sentences. Everyone. Hands much more accustomed to typing than writing were not happy with me after that. The obligatory picture time followed, as kids poured out the front of the building to congratulate each other, shoot the shit, and throw each other (and some teachers) into the air.

Lunch was awesome. It being a Saturday we had no prepared school lunch, so we called in a box lunch strike and had these amazing bentos (that I really should have taken a picture of) airdropped to our immediate location. I <3 Japanese food.

After that, though, things got a little iffy, by which I mean complicated…by which I mean Japanese. All of us teachers and the principal gathered in the gymnasium again to hold a second graduation ceremony for one girl who couldn’t make it to the first one in the morning. Had she been sick? No. Did she have some unavoidable conflict or crisis? No. This took place because she is so incredibly shy that she cannot deal with appearing in front of a large group of people. This is actually somewhat common in Japan – at least compared to other countries – and there are some people in this country who literally have not left their homes in years because they suffer from this disorder. I don’t know how much research has been done on it, but I know that it is curable; I recall actually seeing some news about it recently in which one guy surmounted this hurdle by getting involved in the martial arts. Anyway, while it was certainly compassionate to hold a special ceremony to adapt to this girl’s difficulties, I had to wonder whether she should be graduating from a normal junior high school.
If you recall waaaaay back to the post called Compulsory English and you! you may remember how in Japan, everyone graduates. One need only show up on the first and last day of junior high school to walk away with a diploma. I personally remember this girl coming to class only once in my 7 months here, and even then I was asked not to call on her because this would “make her uncomfortable.” I know for a fact that my school is equipped to deal with special needs students, and my opinion of the special ed here has only improved with time. I also know the two special ed students, and she was not one of them. As best I can tell, this girl sat in her house and hid under a blanket for the last few years, and now she has a diploma. Sigh.

Most of the women (teachers) wore full dress kimono for the event, and so we had a little photo shoot afterwards to commemorate them getting all dolled up. Ms. Giggles was kind of funny; she was constantly adjusting and fretting over how her kimono (incidentally the least form-flattering garment on the planet) made her chest look small. She even shouted at one point something akin to, “Damn it, I’m Japanese! I already don’t have much to work with! Who thought up these stupid things anyway…”

I present to you here the ladies of KJH:
And really, what would this post be worth without a few photos of my graduating class on their final day? Ladies and gentlemen, the class of Heisei 20 (2008):
And another, this time celebrating outside:
And finally, in dress uniform (1/2 the bunch, anyway):

The beginning of the end

Today looked like it would be a dull end to a dreadfully boring week. The only class on the schedule for me was English, 1st period, and I quickly found out that there was no need for me to go – Saint would be passing back some recent tests and explaining the answers so there was nothing for me to do there. With that canceled, I now had nearly eight hours of jack and shit to do. Oh well, time to waste an hour or so on teh internets, right?

Wrong. This last week it turns out that we had some network wiring and stuff updated, and while they were putzing around with that the technicians also tightened the screws on the site blocker that had always been in place. As this is a place of work, websites with dating, violence, porn, or religious (go ahead and make the obvious joke about these two being related, if you must) themes were of course banned – one would expect this. I did not, however, count on Facebook [casual communication], foreign food/beer websites [adult indulgences], and even my friend’s airsoft site [weaponry] also getting the nix. M’eh, I guess Big Brother is going to be watching a little closer from now on. I still have my blog to work on, right?
Nope! That’s now a [message board]. Just for humor, I tried an actual message board, WotC’s Dungeons and Dragons forums, and thought I’d see what would happen. Seems it’s a [game in general], so no love there either. Sigh. My internet wanderings have been chopped off at the proverbial ankle. I still have my email (for now), but not much else.

Well, reading one of the e-books on my flashdrive or writing something were certainly options, but in all honestly I wasn’t in the mood to stare at a screen. Ms. Giggles was just as busy as me, having by this point already endured a rigorous hour of watching the students practice lining up for graduation over and over and over and OVER AND OVER! to the point of near complete mental breakdown.

Pardon the interjection here, but Elvis just gave me this year’s photo of all the teachers. We had it taken by a professional photographer maybe two months ago, and my God it’s bad. Like, laugh-out-loud-I’m-not-sure-I’ll-ever-take-myself-or-any-of-you-seriously-again bad. Here it is in digital format, but since you may not be able to see all the details, I’ll add a bit of description.
The "professional" photographer forgot to mention to me that my jacket was slipping a bit, so it looks like it's hanging off me like a cape. I'm the only one in the whole picture who's most definitely smiling, though I do count 3.8 hints of a smile scattered throughout. Finally, check out that row of tennis shoes in front, matched up impeccably with the suits and ties. Sexy, eh?

Anyway, Giggles and I needed a project, and how. We were on the verge of throwing random objects off the 4th floor balcony just to see which would hit the ground first. Let’s see, 1kg bag of rice and 2nd year textbook…ready…GO! Seriously, though, we were lucky to have both Saint and Elvis come to the rescue, or we may very well have done something illegal.

Elvis has really embraced having me here as his first full-time ALT, and so he had this idea of further internationalizing the school by putting up English translations of all the door signs at room entrances. Normally each room has a two-sided sign like this:

And he wanted to have one side display the room’s purpose in English. This wasn’t to be some half-assed whim, though; we needed signs that would stand the test of time and be around for future generations of uniformed little students to ignore or throw things at.

Out come the rulers, the laminator, the exact-o knives, and other such utensils of the trade. I surveyed the school and translated all of the signs into English, which was a harder task than one might expect. Japanese is one of those languages in which translation is never an exact science; it is so completely different from English that expressions that make perfect sense in Japanese are awkward at best when directly translated, so one has to be creative and really look into the use and meaning of a word before choosing an appropriate English substitute.
Take 被服室 (hifukushitsu) for example. This basically means “clothing room,” but what is a clothing room used for? Is it storage, or perhaps a changing room? I had to know what happened here so that I could make the translation of this place less ambiguous. In Japanese its use is obvious; this is where a sort of home economics class in which the making of clothing is taught. It’s not the only home ec-type class taught here, though, so we had to go with something a little bit more specific than that, while still fitting it on the display sign. We eventually settled on “Sewing Classroom,” which may not be perfect but was good enough for our less-than-exacting standards.

So, we finished with the printing and the laminating of the signs, and luckily this was all taking place on the day before graduation. This meant that the entire student body was in the gymnasium practicing for the ceremony, and I had the school to myself. I ran through the whole place, Mission Impossible-style, stealthily inserting all of the English signs in their appropriate places. The goal, of course, was to Englishify the entire school before the students finished and returned to their classrooms, so this way we teachers could deny everything. “What do you mean, new signs? They haven’t always been bilingual?” Many of my students are gullible enough to not pick up on the ruse, either. Yeah, we’re immature like that. It was a close call, but I slipped into the teachers’ room right as the kids got back.

That was our fabulous time-wasting activity for the day, but getting waaay back to the title of this post, it was also the final day for my sannensei students. The whole day, most especially wandering through the empty halls, was fraught with that feeling – what is that emotion called, that sense of everything coming to a conclusion? Not nostalgia…it’s somewhere between a wistful sadness and a sense of accomplishment and pride, I think. We’ll just leave it at mixed emotions. I really am proud of my sannensei; the majority of them worked hard for this and will have many wonderful memories of this time. I will miss their classes and I hope at least a few stay in contact with me. For better or for worse, tomorrow it all comes to an end.

A Marriage in the Family

I thought for way too long about how I wanted to start this one, but ultimately got sick of thinking and just started typing. This last weekend, not one but two of my coworkers got married - yes, to each other. If you'll take a moment to recall some of my previous nickname posts, the happy new couple are Ninja T of KJH and Closet Naughty of School in the Sky.

Ninja T is the Japanese teacher at KJH, and he's recently become my study aid, by no fault of his own. When there's nothing to do at work I sometimes study Japanese, and when I came across complicated material I used to default to asking my English-teaching coworkers about it. One day I was stumped by a particularly minute detail that I asked Mrs. Freckles about; she jokingly told me to leave her alone and ask the guy who teaches this kind of thing. It didn't take long for Ninja T to become my go-to guy for all such obscurities.

I've known Closet Naughty on a personal level for a while longer; she sits right next to me at SitS (sits...SitS?? oh nevermind, it was unintentional anyway) so we're always talking about this, that, or the other thing. I know a bit more about her and I knew that she had a boyfriend...I did not have a freaking clue that her guy worked with me until their marriage was announced! Granted, they work at separate schools and I pretty much only see each of them at work, but I still have no idea how this never came up even in passing. Ninja T seems to have shinobi-esque qualities beyond those of his table tennis game.

Anyway, on to the event itself. A Japanese wedding, much like an American one, is a two-part affair - the ceremony and the reception. In Japan, however, the ceremony is reserved for close friends and immediate family, and the reception is held separately.
The banquet hall it was held at is in Akita City a few hours away, but since so many of the guests were coming from the Kosaka/Kazuno area, there was a tour bus reserved for getting us there and back. The reception was an afternoon function, so the bus left in the morning and the ride there was pretty quiet - everyone had either fallen asleep or else was wishing they had not yet woken up. We arrived sometime after 11 and had at least an hour to kill before anything got started. This was when it dawned on me what rednecks some of my coworkers are. Yes, just like pretty much every other country, Japan has folk who lack knowledge of the finer points of sophistication. We were all slowly congregating in the lobby of the hotel where this banquet hall was located, and generally making small talk about how we were bored and had nothing to do. So, we sat around in our expensive suits and tried to look important for a bit, but it wasn't long before one of the teachers from SitS hefted his briefcase up, cracked it open, and started passing out cans of cheap beer to everyone.

...Picture, if you will, an elegantly decorated lobby, adorned with chairs worth more than your car and chandeliers worth more than your life. Small clusters of impeccably dressed guests are enjoying small talk on the latest trends and fashions; they are the very image of savoir faire. A uniformed maître d' passes, his practiced eye watching for any sign of guests' discontent.
Suddenly a mighty belch ripples across the room, and in the ensuing silence one can hear a pin drop. It is of course followed by a string of humble apologies, but the damage has been done and the scene has been set. I'm just finishing tuning up my banjo, but alas, the hoedown will have to wait. The bride and groom emerge from double doors at the far end of the room and begin their procession toward the entrance of the banquet hall.

Here they are, flanked by parents on either side. This is unfortunately the only decent picture I got of them in traditional Japanese wedding raiment. The Japanese wedding reception, as it currently stands, appears to borrow heavily from the American version most of us are accustomed to, but it does have a few unique points, as well. We sometimes say (mostly in jest) that the wedding is for the woman - it's her moment to look absolutely astounding and to bask in the adoration of friends and family. In Japan this is doubly (triply?) true, as it is customary for the bride to change gowns at least two times during the event and make a new grand entrance each time.

Here's the lovely bride in costume #2, next to their beast of a wedding cake. Yes, it really was bigger than her.

On to costume #3, as well as a wonderful idea on the part of the bride and groom. When they made their grand entrance this time around, the lights were first dimmed. From the start there had been an unlit candle on each table, and as they passed through the banquet hall they stopped at each table and lit the candle together.

It wouldn't be a proper wedding in any country if friends and family didn't get to devolve into clownish idiocy and have many laughs at the new couple's expense. Here, the bride and groom had to take turns drawing these big hanging scrolls out of a box; each one had a household chore written on it that the lucky winner would be responsible for for the rest of their married life. The two pictured have been claimed by the groom, and say "Bath tub cleaning" and "Taking in the laundry (after it has dried)." This one:
tested their respective knowledge of their new spouse. They were simultaneously asked a question about each other, starting with easy stuff like favorite color, and gradually getting more personal and invasive. They had to write their answers on separate whiteboards which were then displayed for everyone to laugh at. The part where they had to draw a caricature of each other was particularly rich.

And speaking of rich...this whole event, from the decor to the (amazing) meal we were served, reeked of costing a fortune. Either I'm way off in my calculations or someone tapped the Bank of Mommy and Daddy for this one - most especially considering that we got PRESENTS! on the way out, too. I'm not talking little bell-and-whistle souvenirs, either. Each guest got a gift bag which contained a designer chocolate cake and a gift catalog from which each person could select one item to have sent to them at a later date. I went with a pretty hardcore cooking knife.

The way home was inevitably peppered with alcohol consumption; after all, Japan has no open-bottle law, so long as the driver is sober. This was only the natural result of putting a bunch of Akita rednecks on a coach bus for three hours, with restroom breaks at convenience stores that sell liquor...

Ninja T, Closet Naughty - on the off chance that you ever read this, congratulations. I never would have guessed it until I saw the ceremony in person, but you two make an excellent couple. I look forward to much more teaching with each of you, not to mention a plethora of stupid banana jokes.