Life updates

By the time you are reading this article, it will officially be September. And with it, for me, will be the start of classes at my school – although as I’ve said before, the kids never really went away. The construction on the part of the school building being brought up to modern earthquake-resistance standards is nearly done (and with it the constant jackhammering I’d grown so used to), but they still have to rebuild the entryways that they previously demolished. (Apparently a big concrete overhang is a bit of a risk In an earthquake. Who knew?)

It’s also very wet here. Again. This time, it’s not so much the season, as it is a dogged low-pressure system that’s been sitting over central Japan, and dumping enough rain there to actually shut down the trains running through Shizuoka Prefecture for a while last week. Osaka’s only seeing a little bit of it, but it means that my laundry is once again drying indoors, contributing to the overall humidity of my room. Ah, the joys of domestic life.

In addition, being September means that it’s also time for me to get my visa renewed. My original work visa when I came to Japan was only for a single year, and I arrived in the country on September 5, 2007. So last week, I paid a visit to the local immigration office (actually out in the port district of Osaka proper) to get my paperwork straightened out. They stamped my passport and told me to come back in several weeks when I receive a postcard from them. Seeing as how I have a job with a city government and plenty of Japanese skills, there shouldn’t be any reason for them to deny me a three-year extension to my current visa. Nevertheless, when you go into the office and witness the near-chaos of people lined up, waiting for their number to be called, and dealing with desk clerks in a language that they only partially understand… well, you get the distinct sensation that you could make the wrong impression on an underpaid government worker who’s already having a Very Bad Day and end up deported. I’ve got my fingers crossed on that one.

And, following up on last week’s article, my application for the Japanese test in December is in the mail and I have begun preparing. This is a somewhat more… humbling experience than I had originally hoped. While my overall reading ability for passages of text is quite good, I’ve discovered that my knowledge of Chinese characters is a bit more contextual than I’d like. You see, the thing about Chinese characters is that, due to their distinctive shape, you can learn to recognize them fairly easily, especially when they appear in combination with certain other characters to form specific words. Unfortunately, can lead to a very frustrating situation where you know what a character looks like, but either you can’t identify it when it’s by itself, or you can picture it in your head but you can’t reproduce it on paper because you’ve never actually learned to write it. This latter situation is a major affliction in Japan these days, since the advent of word processors means that people write less, and sometimes find themselves staring at a piece of paper trying to conjure up a form they know, but can’t remember how to write. In short, I basically need to nail down my slightly floating character knowledge, and actually commit them to my active literacy skills rather than just passive reading. I’ve got three months and counting…

At the same time, I’m having to deal with a bit of a change of venue for my work. While I’ll be at my current school until the end of this month, after that I’ll be headed to a separate junior high school within the same city. It’s part of the way this city’s system works, in that instead of having assistant English teachers go between two schools all year, they have them attend one school for the first half and the other school for the second half. As a result, I will soon be having to re-acclimate myself to an all-new workplace, with 600 or so new student names to remember. On the bright side, it may provide me even more opportunities to confuse students as to my true Japanese ability. (I have students at my current school convinced I speak only just enough to make myself understood. There are a great many things I have heard which they no doubt thought I would not comprehend. It’s a lot of fun, really.)

At any rate, as long as I continue to survive the rain, the flood of Chinese characters to memorize, and the onslaught of a new school term (and school!), I should be here yet again next week, with a slightly more interesting topic. Wish me luck.