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.
03 September 2008
27 August 2008
Gaining literacy, one square block at a time
It’s that time of year again: time for me to try desperately not to psyche myself out while I fill out the form. This form represents the first step towards being officially recognized as competent in the Japanese language (and thus able to function in capacities other than “language teacher”), and as such, I am quite anxious about the exam that it entails. That exam is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, and after I got a respectable passing score on last year’s Level 2 outing, I’ve decided to commit myself to mastering the language to the point so I can pass Level 1. Basically, that means three frantic months of preparation while I desperately try to keep in my head everything that I’ve learned over the past five and a half years, plus a big heaping spoonful of Chinese characters on top of that.
Ah, Chinese characters. I think I may have mentioned them before, but there really are few things quite the same as them. Imagine, instead of having a set of several dozen letters that (at least loosely) represent particular sounds in sequence, that you have several thousand distinct squarish blocks that all mean something, and you have to know what sound each one makes before you ever set eyes on the page. That is only the beginning of the absolutely convoluted, maddening spiral of kanji in Japanese.
Chinese characters, as you might suspect, got their start in China sometime earlier than 3200 years ago. The inscriptions found from that period, on bronze vessels and on animal bones used for divination, already meet the qualifications for “written language” at this time (rather than “pretty symbols”), however pictorial they were. And while modern Chinese characters are extremely simplified and standardized compared to those earlier writings, their history goes back far enough to make them technically the oldest writing system in continual use. Of course, China, with its age and prestige, just had to go and give other countries ideas, and so it was that around the 5th Century AD, the Chinese writing system (along with Buddhism) gained a permanent foothold in Japan.
Japan at the time had no written form, and at least initially, it stayed that way; anything that was important enough to be written down was written in proper Chinese. But then, sometime in the 7th Century or so, someone got the bright idea to start using Chinese characters for their sound value (meaning? what meaning?) to convey Japanese as-is. This Manyogana (named for the poetry collection that made it famous) was just a stepping stone to what became two full-fledged phonetic alphabets: one started, ironically, by Buddhist monks as a guide to making sense of pure Chinese, and the other by the increasingly-cursive handwriting in the private correspondence of courtiers in Kyoto.
Over the centuries, these three distinct forms of writing melded together into one big unwieldy system of conveying Japanese on the page. The end result is that for the kanji alone, you have multiple readings, made up of: one (or two) based on the original Chinese reading; one (or several, or a lot) based on the meaning of the character but read as a native Japanese word; and really weird, idiosyncratic usages that bear absolutely no relationship to the character used, when it shows up in certain combinations. As you can imagine, all this results in one big headache. Or rather, about 2,000 headaches, since that’s how many Chinese characters I’m supposed to know. At least I’m only being tested on how to read the things, since my handwriting is bad enough with Latin letters, let alone other writing systems.
It’s not really a hopeless situation, though: I mean, I already have a fairly substantial number of characters (over 1000, for last year’s test) underneath my belt, and being exposed to the language every single day, there’s plenty of characters I recognize, but simply haven’t developed a conscious knowledge of their meaning yet. And while there are some completely baffling ones out there, the vast majority of characters can be split into a “general meaning” portion, and another portion that crops up in multiple other characters and has some relationship to the (Chinese reading’s) sound. Because of this, the more characters you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. But I’m convinced there’s got to be some kind of limit to this after a while, and I’m always worried about running into it before I’m satisfied with the extent of my literacy.
Of course, Chinese characters are by no means the full extent of the Japanese writing system, nor do they represent the entirety of really weird choices made in the history of the language. For one thing, there’s tons of grammar on this year’s test that (as far as I am aware) never comes up apart from in works of literature. I mean, I can understand an author wanting to sound erudite, but few works of modern English literature are written like Shakespeare, aside from Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the early 1600s. So having to learn specific patterns I know I will never personally use in my everyday conversation (except to sound really weird) is just another one of those Japanese language quirks I can add to the pile.
Overall, learning Japanese has been and remains an enjoyable, if sometimes perplexing experience for me, but things like this can feel just a bit overwhelming at times. But of course, only half-understanding a block of solid text is much more frustrating than not understanding any and ignoring it completely, so I must press on. It may be cold comfort, but I can at least take some solace in the fact that the Japanese writing system as it currently stands is actually the postwar simplified version. Pity the ones made to learn it before then…
Ah, Chinese characters. I think I may have mentioned them before, but there really are few things quite the same as them. Imagine, instead of having a set of several dozen letters that (at least loosely) represent particular sounds in sequence, that you have several thousand distinct squarish blocks that all mean something, and you have to know what sound each one makes before you ever set eyes on the page. That is only the beginning of the absolutely convoluted, maddening spiral of kanji in Japanese.
Chinese characters, as you might suspect, got their start in China sometime earlier than 3200 years ago. The inscriptions found from that period, on bronze vessels and on animal bones used for divination, already meet the qualifications for “written language” at this time (rather than “pretty symbols”), however pictorial they were. And while modern Chinese characters are extremely simplified and standardized compared to those earlier writings, their history goes back far enough to make them technically the oldest writing system in continual use. Of course, China, with its age and prestige, just had to go and give other countries ideas, and so it was that around the 5th Century AD, the Chinese writing system (along with Buddhism) gained a permanent foothold in Japan.
Japan at the time had no written form, and at least initially, it stayed that way; anything that was important enough to be written down was written in proper Chinese. But then, sometime in the 7th Century or so, someone got the bright idea to start using Chinese characters for their sound value (meaning? what meaning?) to convey Japanese as-is. This Manyogana (named for the poetry collection that made it famous) was just a stepping stone to what became two full-fledged phonetic alphabets: one started, ironically, by Buddhist monks as a guide to making sense of pure Chinese, and the other by the increasingly-cursive handwriting in the private correspondence of courtiers in Kyoto.
Over the centuries, these three distinct forms of writing melded together into one big unwieldy system of conveying Japanese on the page. The end result is that for the kanji alone, you have multiple readings, made up of: one (or two) based on the original Chinese reading; one (or several, or a lot) based on the meaning of the character but read as a native Japanese word; and really weird, idiosyncratic usages that bear absolutely no relationship to the character used, when it shows up in certain combinations. As you can imagine, all this results in one big headache. Or rather, about 2,000 headaches, since that’s how many Chinese characters I’m supposed to know. At least I’m only being tested on how to read the things, since my handwriting is bad enough with Latin letters, let alone other writing systems.
It’s not really a hopeless situation, though: I mean, I already have a fairly substantial number of characters (over 1000, for last year’s test) underneath my belt, and being exposed to the language every single day, there’s plenty of characters I recognize, but simply haven’t developed a conscious knowledge of their meaning yet. And while there are some completely baffling ones out there, the vast majority of characters can be split into a “general meaning” portion, and another portion that crops up in multiple other characters and has some relationship to the (Chinese reading’s) sound. Because of this, the more characters you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. But I’m convinced there’s got to be some kind of limit to this after a while, and I’m always worried about running into it before I’m satisfied with the extent of my literacy.
Of course, Chinese characters are by no means the full extent of the Japanese writing system, nor do they represent the entirety of really weird choices made in the history of the language. For one thing, there’s tons of grammar on this year’s test that (as far as I am aware) never comes up apart from in works of literature. I mean, I can understand an author wanting to sound erudite, but few works of modern English literature are written like Shakespeare, aside from Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the early 1600s. So having to learn specific patterns I know I will never personally use in my everyday conversation (except to sound really weird) is just another one of those Japanese language quirks I can add to the pile.
Overall, learning Japanese has been and remains an enjoyable, if sometimes perplexing experience for me, but things like this can feel just a bit overwhelming at times. But of course, only half-understanding a block of solid text is much more frustrating than not understanding any and ignoring it completely, so I must press on. It may be cold comfort, but I can at least take some solace in the fact that the Japanese writing system as it currently stands is actually the postwar simplified version. Pity the ones made to learn it before then…
20 August 2008
Blowing smoke... the other way, if you please
As it nears the end of August, I am getting ready to celebrate an important milestone: the one-year anniversary of my coming to Japan. The past eleven-and-a-half months have been filled with all sorts of new experiences and unexpected misunderstandings – some of which I’ve already related in this column – and with any luck, things will continue on apace. But in spite of that, there are still some things that I really haven’t gotten used to here, and one of the big ones that really, really bugs me is the smoking.
Now, I don’t mean any disrespect to those of you out there who are part of “the habit”: after all, I have had many friends and relatives over the years who are or have been smokers. Even my own father, a doctor of all people, did so at one point. In spite of this, I have never understood the appeal of inhaling fumes containing many different chemicals that would be lethal on their own, in amounts just small enough to let you die of long-term health problems, like cancer and emphysema, instead. And then there’s the smoke itself. I can still vividly remember coming home from my summer job as a bus boy in a smoke-filled restaurant years ago, and hacking up soot. In those days, I kind of felt like my job and coal-mining had a lot in common, at least in terms of the health risks. (I had that wrong, though: actually, tobacco smoke is much deadlier in terms of actual deaths caused worldwide per year.)
These days, of course, a lot of that has changed: an increasingly health-conscious America has put ever-tighter restrictions on tobacco use, and in New York State in particular, not only are vending machines for cigarettes virtually gone (maybe by law, though I’m fuzzy on that), but smoking itself is also outlawed in public establishments. This is a far cry from even ten years ago in the US, and virtually alien to what things were like 50 years ago, but as they say, time marches on. Japan, on the other hand, is somewhat behind the curve.
For one thing, Japan, with the world’s highest concentration of vending machines per capita, also sells cigarettes in them. Said vending machines are usually out on the street, and when I came to Japan the first time two years ago, literally anyone could buy them. Japan does technically have age restrictions on the purchase of tobacco products, just as the US does, but that wouldn’t stop any intrepid youth from simply inserting a few coins and getting the brand they want. It was only this year that the makers finally instituted an age-check in the form of smart cards required to use them. Even with that, though, it’s still jarring to see them out in the open. But I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, since at times it also seems like everybody smokes.
Obviously, not everyone does, and I have a fairly large number of non-smoker friends (partly due to self-selection), but walking down the street, at times you’re liable to see practically every other person with a cigarette in hand, or the implements necessary to light up at a moment’s notice. It’s rather surreal, and made more bizarre by the fact that the usual Japanese consideration for the people around oneself seems to fly out the window the moment they light up. At least in my experience, people are quite careless in where they direct their smoke, which (as you might have guessed) tends to be in my direction.
And then there are the restaurants. As New York used to have prior to the blanket ban on smoking in public places, there is a smoking section and a non-smoking section. However, it would seem that the people who design these spaces are not well acquainted with why the division exists, because more often than not, sitting in the “non-smoking” section entails sitting next to a group of smokers who are in the “smoking” section… which is in the middle of the same room, with no physical barriers whatsoever. In other places, there may be a nominal partition, but its effectiveness at actually blocking the smoke is minimal, at best. At times, it even seems like smokers get first priority, as I’ve personally witnessed customers unable to get into the “smoking” area just light up in the “non-smoking” area where they decided to sit instead, and nobody said anything. On the other hand, that may just be because people don’t really like to “rock the boat” here, the end result being that “strictly prohibited” is more realistically read as “grudgingly tolerated”. It isn’t just due to money considerations that I dine out less often in Japan.
The single most bizarre thing for a country where so many people smoke, though, is that I have seen very few cigarette butts just lying around on the street. In fact, Japan tends not to have too much garbage lying about in general, and that’s in spite of the fact that there are relatively few trashcans to put it in. Generally, people just bring such refuse with them and throw it out when they find a proper receptacle, but it’s still jarring to see. Conscientiousness is good and all, but sometimes it just feels a tad… I don’t know… creepy. One thing I know for sure, though is that I am and will remain a non-smoker for the foreseeable future. Cigarette smoke just irritates me (and my lungs) too much.
Now, I don’t mean any disrespect to those of you out there who are part of “the habit”: after all, I have had many friends and relatives over the years who are or have been smokers. Even my own father, a doctor of all people, did so at one point. In spite of this, I have never understood the appeal of inhaling fumes containing many different chemicals that would be lethal on their own, in amounts just small enough to let you die of long-term health problems, like cancer and emphysema, instead. And then there’s the smoke itself. I can still vividly remember coming home from my summer job as a bus boy in a smoke-filled restaurant years ago, and hacking up soot. In those days, I kind of felt like my job and coal-mining had a lot in common, at least in terms of the health risks. (I had that wrong, though: actually, tobacco smoke is much deadlier in terms of actual deaths caused worldwide per year.)
These days, of course, a lot of that has changed: an increasingly health-conscious America has put ever-tighter restrictions on tobacco use, and in New York State in particular, not only are vending machines for cigarettes virtually gone (maybe by law, though I’m fuzzy on that), but smoking itself is also outlawed in public establishments. This is a far cry from even ten years ago in the US, and virtually alien to what things were like 50 years ago, but as they say, time marches on. Japan, on the other hand, is somewhat behind the curve.
For one thing, Japan, with the world’s highest concentration of vending machines per capita, also sells cigarettes in them. Said vending machines are usually out on the street, and when I came to Japan the first time two years ago, literally anyone could buy them. Japan does technically have age restrictions on the purchase of tobacco products, just as the US does, but that wouldn’t stop any intrepid youth from simply inserting a few coins and getting the brand they want. It was only this year that the makers finally instituted an age-check in the form of smart cards required to use them. Even with that, though, it’s still jarring to see them out in the open. But I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, since at times it also seems like everybody smokes.
Obviously, not everyone does, and I have a fairly large number of non-smoker friends (partly due to self-selection), but walking down the street, at times you’re liable to see practically every other person with a cigarette in hand, or the implements necessary to light up at a moment’s notice. It’s rather surreal, and made more bizarre by the fact that the usual Japanese consideration for the people around oneself seems to fly out the window the moment they light up. At least in my experience, people are quite careless in where they direct their smoke, which (as you might have guessed) tends to be in my direction.
And then there are the restaurants. As New York used to have prior to the blanket ban on smoking in public places, there is a smoking section and a non-smoking section. However, it would seem that the people who design these spaces are not well acquainted with why the division exists, because more often than not, sitting in the “non-smoking” section entails sitting next to a group of smokers who are in the “smoking” section… which is in the middle of the same room, with no physical barriers whatsoever. In other places, there may be a nominal partition, but its effectiveness at actually blocking the smoke is minimal, at best. At times, it even seems like smokers get first priority, as I’ve personally witnessed customers unable to get into the “smoking” area just light up in the “non-smoking” area where they decided to sit instead, and nobody said anything. On the other hand, that may just be because people don’t really like to “rock the boat” here, the end result being that “strictly prohibited” is more realistically read as “grudgingly tolerated”. It isn’t just due to money considerations that I dine out less often in Japan.
The single most bizarre thing for a country where so many people smoke, though, is that I have seen very few cigarette butts just lying around on the street. In fact, Japan tends not to have too much garbage lying about in general, and that’s in spite of the fact that there are relatively few trashcans to put it in. Generally, people just bring such refuse with them and throw it out when they find a proper receptacle, but it’s still jarring to see. Conscientiousness is good and all, but sometimes it just feels a tad… I don’t know… creepy. One thing I know for sure, though is that I am and will remain a non-smoker for the foreseeable future. Cigarette smoke just irritates me (and my lungs) too much.
13 August 2008
Working in an earthquake-prone school
Not too long ago, there was a fairly substantial earthquake up in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, which I found out about first through worried friends and relatives. While it was quite far from me and caused relatively little in the way of property damage or human casualties, it did provide me with the jumping-off point for exploring the sometimes-unnerving reality of living in a country where earthquakes are a regular occurrence and entire cities occasionally leveled by them. I am still, as I was then, mostly unconcerned about my own particular lifestyle being affected by these quakes, but two things have occurred lately that are enough to give me pause.
The first is an aftershock in the same area hit by the earthquake from a few months ago. While it didn’t take any lives, it’s somewhat unnerving because this aftershock was actually stronger than the initial earthquake, and (as the TV show I was watching so helpfully stressed) would cause rather complete and catastrophic damage to pretty much any building not up to modern earthquake-resistant building codes. So, imagine my surprise when I read an article the next day, which in its cheerfully alarmist fashion, pointed out that most school buildings in Osaka prefecture were built between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, and that city and prefectural school boards had been dragging their heels about fixing the problem since at least the Kobe earthquake thirteen and a half years ago. So, as it turns out, the school I work in is not safe in the event of a major earthquake. Great.
Luckily, said exposé, coupled with still lingering images from the Chinese earthquakes earlier this year (where school buildings simply collapsed on top of the schoolchildren inside), seems to have motivated cities all around Osaka to actually do something about it. This includes, as luck would have it, my school. Well, sort of.
Matsubara is not a very large city compared to the other cities of Osaka Prefecture, but it still has seven junior high schools, fifteen elementary schools, and a few nursery schools run by the city board of education. As you can imagine, this means that bringing all of these schools up to modern earthquake resistance standards is quite the arduous (and expensive) undertaking. And between a chronically under-funded budget and not wanting to play favorites with any of the schools, this means that each school gets to have a bit of it brought up to code at a time.
In my case, this means that one particular section of the main school building has been spending the summer break getting its concrete superstructure reinforced by metal rods, having concrete overhangs taken down from above the first-floor entrances, and having lots and lots of holes dug and/or drilled into it in order to accomplish this. So, in spite of my relatively quiet summer break, it has actually been punctuated at regular intervals by the sound of jackhammering. (I know it’s for a good purpose and all, but could they try keeping it down a bit?) They also removed sections of floor at ground level, in order to reinforce that too. The final stage involves attaching a large number of angled reinforcing columns to the outside of the building, which turns the school into what looks kind of like a gigantic Erector set (y’know… like Legos, but metal plates with screws and gears and such), In short, that particular part of the school is a gigantic mess right now, and I wonder whether they’ll actually finish it in time for classes to start up again (back at my college, they certainly never did, though Japan prides itself on punctuality so I don’t really know).
Of course, the reinforcement method, while effective and (relatively) inexpensive, also has the upshot of making the reinforced structure slightly… unappealing from a visual standpoint. Since it is a standard Japanese-style junior high school, that’s not necessarily going to detract from its original appearance, but it’s certainly quite apparent, especially considering that the rest of the school has yet to undergo this transformation. But then again, I suppose that all things considered, a safe building is much more appealing in terms of survival, no matter what its particular looks happen to be. Not that these reinforcements will do me much good. The first part of the main building they’re doing at my school houses the home ec, science, and computer classrooms, none of which have much in common with my current job. They will eventually progress to the rest of the building, but who knows where I’ll be working by the time they finish everything… it could take years.
So, with all that going on in the midst of my summer vacation, I’m rather hoping that things calm down at least a little bit before classes start again. And hoping and praying that we don’t get any major earthquakes in Osaka while I’m teaching. I just need to remember my mantra, “I like hot springs. I like hot springs. I like hot springs” As long as Japan has those, I can put up (mostly) with the worries that seismic instability’s other, more negative aspects create. Now, where’d I leave that safety helmet…?
The first is an aftershock in the same area hit by the earthquake from a few months ago. While it didn’t take any lives, it’s somewhat unnerving because this aftershock was actually stronger than the initial earthquake, and (as the TV show I was watching so helpfully stressed) would cause rather complete and catastrophic damage to pretty much any building not up to modern earthquake-resistant building codes. So, imagine my surprise when I read an article the next day, which in its cheerfully alarmist fashion, pointed out that most school buildings in Osaka prefecture were built between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, and that city and prefectural school boards had been dragging their heels about fixing the problem since at least the Kobe earthquake thirteen and a half years ago. So, as it turns out, the school I work in is not safe in the event of a major earthquake. Great.
Luckily, said exposé, coupled with still lingering images from the Chinese earthquakes earlier this year (where school buildings simply collapsed on top of the schoolchildren inside), seems to have motivated cities all around Osaka to actually do something about it. This includes, as luck would have it, my school. Well, sort of.
Matsubara is not a very large city compared to the other cities of Osaka Prefecture, but it still has seven junior high schools, fifteen elementary schools, and a few nursery schools run by the city board of education. As you can imagine, this means that bringing all of these schools up to modern earthquake resistance standards is quite the arduous (and expensive) undertaking. And between a chronically under-funded budget and not wanting to play favorites with any of the schools, this means that each school gets to have a bit of it brought up to code at a time.
In my case, this means that one particular section of the main school building has been spending the summer break getting its concrete superstructure reinforced by metal rods, having concrete overhangs taken down from above the first-floor entrances, and having lots and lots of holes dug and/or drilled into it in order to accomplish this. So, in spite of my relatively quiet summer break, it has actually been punctuated at regular intervals by the sound of jackhammering. (I know it’s for a good purpose and all, but could they try keeping it down a bit?) They also removed sections of floor at ground level, in order to reinforce that too. The final stage involves attaching a large number of angled reinforcing columns to the outside of the building, which turns the school into what looks kind of like a gigantic Erector set (y’know… like Legos, but metal plates with screws and gears and such), In short, that particular part of the school is a gigantic mess right now, and I wonder whether they’ll actually finish it in time for classes to start up again (back at my college, they certainly never did, though Japan prides itself on punctuality so I don’t really know).
Of course, the reinforcement method, while effective and (relatively) inexpensive, also has the upshot of making the reinforced structure slightly… unappealing from a visual standpoint. Since it is a standard Japanese-style junior high school, that’s not necessarily going to detract from its original appearance, but it’s certainly quite apparent, especially considering that the rest of the school has yet to undergo this transformation. But then again, I suppose that all things considered, a safe building is much more appealing in terms of survival, no matter what its particular looks happen to be. Not that these reinforcements will do me much good. The first part of the main building they’re doing at my school houses the home ec, science, and computer classrooms, none of which have much in common with my current job. They will eventually progress to the rest of the building, but who knows where I’ll be working by the time they finish everything… it could take years.
So, with all that going on in the midst of my summer vacation, I’m rather hoping that things calm down at least a little bit before classes start again. And hoping and praying that we don’t get any major earthquakes in Osaka while I’m teaching. I just need to remember my mantra, “I like hot springs. I like hot springs. I like hot springs” As long as Japan has those, I can put up (mostly) with the worries that seismic instability’s other, more negative aspects create. Now, where’d I leave that safety helmet…?
06 August 2008
Summer vacation?
August is just about here in Osaka, and with it, the students are now in the middle of their summer vacation. In fact, they have been since the middle of July. With it, is a conspicuous lack of classes, and what you’d think would be a conspicuous lack of students. But perhaps I should really be saying summer “vacation”, because, you see… the students are still here.
Summer vacation in Japan is not a time of unmitigated relaxation and fun-having the way that most of us Americans are used to. Instead, it seems that the Japanese philosophy is that through hard work, you can overcome such frivolous things as “fun” and “idleness.” During the summer break, club activities continue straight through, and Japanese students (who are basically all expected to belong to one club or another) are made to attend on days their club is in session, which is at least once a week. And if that weren’t bad enough, there are also several mandatory assembly days where the entire student body must come in to be harangued for several hours about not giving in to the temptations to have a good time, and being always studious and upright. (I wish I was exaggerating as much as you think I am.)
And that’s not all. One of the hallmarks of summer vacation for Japanese students is the homework. Not content with simply making kids come to school during what (to me) is a sacred time of relaxation and fun, teachers (at the behest of the Ministry of Education) also saddle them with large amounts of work for them to complete over the course of the break. On the one hand, I can see the logic in this: the academic year starts in April and ends in March, so the students will still be learning the same material when they get back, and this will help keep their skills sharp for their return. On the other hand, it does take away quite a bit from the supposedly “carefree” nature of summer, and there are plenty of students who wait until the very last week of vacation to do it all, thereby negating much of the value it’s intended to have.
Between the clubs, mandatory assembly days, and piles of homework, the summer break for Japanese students is a far cry from what most of us are familiar with. But what do the Japanese students think? When I told the kids that not only do American students have nearly twice as long for summer vacation, but they also have no homework, I got a range of reactions from disbelief to outright envy. Poor things. But believe it or not, their, their situation is actually better than Japanese children a generation ago had it: up until the early part of this decade, students had a mandatory half-day on Saturdays during the year, and even more school-related activity during summer “vacation”. Not that it gives them any less of a raw deal now, of course.
As for me, I’m still coming into the school pretty much every day, in spite of the lack of classes. Instead, my time is taken up by reading, studying Japanese, working on various English-related projects, and walking around, engaging students in conversation. (Sample conversation: “Hi, [name]. How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” “I’m hot.” “Me too.”) Because of this, it’s not quite as boring as I expected it to be, though I certainly still have a bit more free time during my work hours than I’m quite sure what to do with. I do have some vacation time though, and as a matter of fact, I’ll be headed to Tokyo this weekend (or last weekend when you read this) to meet up with a friend and do some sightseeing. I’m looking forward to that, as well as having a justification to ride the Shinkansen there. After all, the journey is half the fun, right?
P.S. An update on my cicada situation – I believe I wrote in my article two weeks ago that cicadas were “entirely harmless” to humans. As it turns out, this is not the case. I found this out when I got beaned by one while riding my bike to school. They may not look like much, but those things pack a wallop, and they seem incapable of flying in a straight line. Luckily, I don’t think it left a mark. That’d be quite the bruise to explain…
Summer vacation in Japan is not a time of unmitigated relaxation and fun-having the way that most of us Americans are used to. Instead, it seems that the Japanese philosophy is that through hard work, you can overcome such frivolous things as “fun” and “idleness.” During the summer break, club activities continue straight through, and Japanese students (who are basically all expected to belong to one club or another) are made to attend on days their club is in session, which is at least once a week. And if that weren’t bad enough, there are also several mandatory assembly days where the entire student body must come in to be harangued for several hours about not giving in to the temptations to have a good time, and being always studious and upright. (I wish I was exaggerating as much as you think I am.)
And that’s not all. One of the hallmarks of summer vacation for Japanese students is the homework. Not content with simply making kids come to school during what (to me) is a sacred time of relaxation and fun, teachers (at the behest of the Ministry of Education) also saddle them with large amounts of work for them to complete over the course of the break. On the one hand, I can see the logic in this: the academic year starts in April and ends in March, so the students will still be learning the same material when they get back, and this will help keep their skills sharp for their return. On the other hand, it does take away quite a bit from the supposedly “carefree” nature of summer, and there are plenty of students who wait until the very last week of vacation to do it all, thereby negating much of the value it’s intended to have.
Between the clubs, mandatory assembly days, and piles of homework, the summer break for Japanese students is a far cry from what most of us are familiar with. But what do the Japanese students think? When I told the kids that not only do American students have nearly twice as long for summer vacation, but they also have no homework, I got a range of reactions from disbelief to outright envy. Poor things. But believe it or not, their, their situation is actually better than Japanese children a generation ago had it: up until the early part of this decade, students had a mandatory half-day on Saturdays during the year, and even more school-related activity during summer “vacation”. Not that it gives them any less of a raw deal now, of course.
As for me, I’m still coming into the school pretty much every day, in spite of the lack of classes. Instead, my time is taken up by reading, studying Japanese, working on various English-related projects, and walking around, engaging students in conversation. (Sample conversation: “Hi, [name]. How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” “I’m hot.” “Me too.”) Because of this, it’s not quite as boring as I expected it to be, though I certainly still have a bit more free time during my work hours than I’m quite sure what to do with. I do have some vacation time though, and as a matter of fact, I’ll be headed to Tokyo this weekend (or last weekend when you read this) to meet up with a friend and do some sightseeing. I’m looking forward to that, as well as having a justification to ride the Shinkansen there. After all, the journey is half the fun, right?
P.S. An update on my cicada situation – I believe I wrote in my article two weeks ago that cicadas were “entirely harmless” to humans. As it turns out, this is not the case. I found this out when I got beaned by one while riding my bike to school. They may not look like much, but those things pack a wallop, and they seem incapable of flying in a straight line. Luckily, I don’t think it left a mark. That’d be quite the bruise to explain…
30 July 2008
Konbini country
Another week has gone by, and it’s still a lot hotter than I’d like it to be here in Osaka. You know you’re in for an absolutely scorching afternoon when you realize that your comfortably-cool air conditioning is set to the equivalent of 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s easily pushing 100 outside. Apparently, August is supposed to be hotter; I guess I’ll find that out soon enough. But in the meantime, there is once place I can always count on to get me out of the heat and into a protective zone of comfort and familiarity. It’s open all day and night, is air-conditioned, and the friendly face at the counter will never tell me that I’ve worn out my welcome. This, of course, would be a convenience store.
Convenience stores in Japan (called konbini, in the Japanese way of simplifying all long words down to precisely 4 morae) are, in a word, ubiquitous. This country went from having close to none 30 or so years ago, to being pretty much saturated. It’s hard to walk more than a block in any direction around here, without encountering at least one, and as a matter of fact, there happens to be one in the builiding next to the one my apartment’s in. There’s practically one on every corner of a city… except that sometimes you’ll find one in between the ones on the corners, and perhaps another one at the same corner, peering back from across the street. I suppose that certainly makes them a convenience, when you barely even have to walk to get there. I’m equally impressed that they get enough business to warrant such tight placement; the population density of Japan’s cities probably accounts for some of that, but it’s still really weird to see in practice. The only thing I can compare it to is the ludicrously closely-spaced McDonald’s and Starbucks one might see in places like New York City, but the convenience stores here are usually also competing businesses, which somehow seem to thrive in spite of technically trying to outdo the other ones.
The other thing that really strikes me about Japanese convenience stores is that they completely dispense with the gas station. Perhaps it’s not as surprising as it might sound: gas stations in Japan are typically full-service affairs, with gasoline filler nozzles suspended from overhead, garage facilities on the premises, and a footprint that’s as small as possible to have them. The end result is that there’s simply no room to put the American style convenience store at most gas stations, and most people seem perfectly happy to separate out their fuel and konbini outings into separate trips.
As for the stores themselves, they are all (as far as I’ve seen) brightly lit, stocked with everything you could possibly need at 3 in the morning: food, stationery, grooming products, drinks, and even basic clothes when it comes to one particular chain. They’re popular during the daytime as well, featuring plenty of foodstuffs, catering to Japanese tastes. Not only do they have prepackaged lunches in a variety of styles (“konbini bento,” or “convenience store boxed lunch”), but they’ve also got lots of different bread-based items, from the sweet (danishes, donuts, chocolate “sandwiches”) to the savory and somewhat… odd-sounding (ham and egg buns, tuna-mayonnaise rolls, and the infamous curry donut). But that’s not all – you can also pay your bills at the convenience store (which I do), use its ATM (again, which I do), ship packages (again, I’ve done this), and in some places, purchase movie and concert tickets at special computerized kiosks. Essentially, Japanese convenience stores redefine what you expect out of a place that does, after all, have “convenience” as part of its name. One of the things you can’t get at the local 7-Eleven, though, is a Slurpee – apparently, they never caught on here. Lottery tickets are also generally sold at dedicated kiosks outside of other stores, so you won’t find them at a konbini either. At least in these cases, I don’t have any particular objections.
Now, as for beating the heat… while loitering in a convenience store is perhaps not the most productive way to spend one’s time, the air conditioning there is hard to beat, and the store clerk seems generally reluctant to encourage me to go elsewhere. This could just be official policy, or it could be that I’m a Scary Foreigner. Either way, I still try not to hang around too long… or thumb through the magazines, since they seem to let their customers do that without ever buying them. Go figure. But any rate, convenience stores are just another aspect of this country that I find especially appealing: after all, where else can you buy a decent quality boxed lunch, a pair of socks, a curry donut, and tickets to your favorite band’s concert – all at 4 in the morning?
Convenience stores in Japan (called konbini, in the Japanese way of simplifying all long words down to precisely 4 morae) are, in a word, ubiquitous. This country went from having close to none 30 or so years ago, to being pretty much saturated. It’s hard to walk more than a block in any direction around here, without encountering at least one, and as a matter of fact, there happens to be one in the builiding next to the one my apartment’s in. There’s practically one on every corner of a city… except that sometimes you’ll find one in between the ones on the corners, and perhaps another one at the same corner, peering back from across the street. I suppose that certainly makes them a convenience, when you barely even have to walk to get there. I’m equally impressed that they get enough business to warrant such tight placement; the population density of Japan’s cities probably accounts for some of that, but it’s still really weird to see in practice. The only thing I can compare it to is the ludicrously closely-spaced McDonald’s and Starbucks one might see in places like New York City, but the convenience stores here are usually also competing businesses, which somehow seem to thrive in spite of technically trying to outdo the other ones.
The other thing that really strikes me about Japanese convenience stores is that they completely dispense with the gas station. Perhaps it’s not as surprising as it might sound: gas stations in Japan are typically full-service affairs, with gasoline filler nozzles suspended from overhead, garage facilities on the premises, and a footprint that’s as small as possible to have them. The end result is that there’s simply no room to put the American style convenience store at most gas stations, and most people seem perfectly happy to separate out their fuel and konbini outings into separate trips.
As for the stores themselves, they are all (as far as I’ve seen) brightly lit, stocked with everything you could possibly need at 3 in the morning: food, stationery, grooming products, drinks, and even basic clothes when it comes to one particular chain. They’re popular during the daytime as well, featuring plenty of foodstuffs, catering to Japanese tastes. Not only do they have prepackaged lunches in a variety of styles (“konbini bento,” or “convenience store boxed lunch”), but they’ve also got lots of different bread-based items, from the sweet (danishes, donuts, chocolate “sandwiches”) to the savory and somewhat… odd-sounding (ham and egg buns, tuna-mayonnaise rolls, and the infamous curry donut). But that’s not all – you can also pay your bills at the convenience store (which I do), use its ATM (again, which I do), ship packages (again, I’ve done this), and in some places, purchase movie and concert tickets at special computerized kiosks. Essentially, Japanese convenience stores redefine what you expect out of a place that does, after all, have “convenience” as part of its name. One of the things you can’t get at the local 7-Eleven, though, is a Slurpee – apparently, they never caught on here. Lottery tickets are also generally sold at dedicated kiosks outside of other stores, so you won’t find them at a konbini either. At least in these cases, I don’t have any particular objections.
Now, as for beating the heat… while loitering in a convenience store is perhaps not the most productive way to spend one’s time, the air conditioning there is hard to beat, and the store clerk seems generally reluctant to encourage me to go elsewhere. This could just be official policy, or it could be that I’m a Scary Foreigner. Either way, I still try not to hang around too long… or thumb through the magazines, since they seem to let their customers do that without ever buying them. Go figure. But any rate, convenience stores are just another aspect of this country that I find especially appealing: after all, where else can you buy a decent quality boxed lunch, a pair of socks, a curry donut, and tickets to your favorite band’s concert – all at 4 in the morning?
23 July 2008
Encountering wildlife (part 1)
As the long, hot, and inescapably humid summer wears on here in Osaka, yet another traditional facet of summer in Japan has reared its alien head. Well, actually, not so much “it” as “they”. And by they, there must be at least a few million of them around here. I am talking, of course, about the cicadas.
Cicadas, a kind of bug famous for their long life cycle (and exceedingly short adult phase), are by no means unique to Japan, but since I hadn’t encountered that many up close when living in the North Country, it came as something of a shock to find that their population density in Japan rivals that of the humans. I found this out one morning last week, as I was jolted from my slumber by an eerie buzzing sound. going out onto the balcony of my apartment to see what was up, I was greeted by the near-deafening sound of lots and lots and lots of cicadas, all making their signature noise at once. Even after a week of getting used to it, it’s still quite disconcerting to hear when I’m just waking up and not yet able to remember just what that infernal racket is.
In spite of that, I do have to admit that I find the cicadas pretty cool. As bugs go, they’re a decent size, easy to spot, and entirely harmless to humans, which means that their song is regarded something along the lines of crickets chirping on a summer night back home. Only, much louder. But what the students at my school find the most entertaining by far is the shed skin they leave behind after molting. This outer layer of exoskeleton, which usually holds the shape of its former occupant quite well, appears to be an object of immense value to find during their outdoor activities. The reason, of course, is that they are an ideal size (and just “gross” enough) for chucking at one another. Plus, showing one to a female student seems to be an easy way to elicit an absolutely ear-splitting scream. (In the interest of fairness, however, I should note that some of the girls do this to each other, which makes it seem as though their horror and revulsion is something of a selective response.) Clearly, the empty shells alone provide hours of entertainment. And while I don’t know just how old this “game” is, there’s a reference to them in the Tale of Genj (though it has less to do with cicada shell-throwing than it does with a lady shedding her outer robe to escape the overly-amorous main character). Personally, I think maybe the story would be better if it had some cicada shell-chucking, but maybe that’s just me.
Aside from gathering the discarded shells, however, another popular pastime in Japan is cicada-catching. This involves going out with your net and collecting as many cicadas as you can, in order to… be the best collector, I suppose. Bug catching as a whole is a popular hobby for children in Japan, no doubt due to the island’s plentiful supply of oversized and/or weird-looking insects and arachnids to find. (Mothra is a stretch, but not by quite as much as you’d think.) At any rate, it’s easy to see where the idea for games like Pokemon came from: it’s just a natural extension of what’s already a popular pastime for Japanese children. Minus the wandering around for months without parental supervision, anyway.
Of course, with the bug population being what it is, there’s plenty of things that get by through eating them, and perhaps the most numerous that I’ve seen are the bats. Now, I know that there are bats in Northern New York, as we’ve had a few in our attic over the years (a fact my mother can certainly vouch for), but I never really saw them in action until I came here. At twilight, you can see them, circling, swooping, and flapping their leathery wings over the many rice paddies in the area. The first time I saw them, I thought they were just a flock of large-ish birds, but once I saw them up close, I realized that not only were they bats, but there were an awful lot of them. If I were a more squeamish person, this would probably lead to nightmares and such, but as long as they don’t bother me, I’m fine with it. After all, they keep the mosquito population down, and in a country whose chief grain product is farmed in fields full of standing water, this is important. (I suppose that this would also be the place to mention that I’m looking forward to a certain movie about a certain bat-themed individual, but unfortunately, it won’t come out here for another three weeks.)
But while bugs and the things that eat them are all well and good, there are far more (and arguably more famous) creatures that can be touched upon… hopefully I’ll get to those in another article. Until then, I’ll be trying not to wake up in a panic from the cicadas’ song.
Cicadas, a kind of bug famous for their long life cycle (and exceedingly short adult phase), are by no means unique to Japan, but since I hadn’t encountered that many up close when living in the North Country, it came as something of a shock to find that their population density in Japan rivals that of the humans. I found this out one morning last week, as I was jolted from my slumber by an eerie buzzing sound. going out onto the balcony of my apartment to see what was up, I was greeted by the near-deafening sound of lots and lots and lots of cicadas, all making their signature noise at once. Even after a week of getting used to it, it’s still quite disconcerting to hear when I’m just waking up and not yet able to remember just what that infernal racket is.
In spite of that, I do have to admit that I find the cicadas pretty cool. As bugs go, they’re a decent size, easy to spot, and entirely harmless to humans, which means that their song is regarded something along the lines of crickets chirping on a summer night back home. Only, much louder. But what the students at my school find the most entertaining by far is the shed skin they leave behind after molting. This outer layer of exoskeleton, which usually holds the shape of its former occupant quite well, appears to be an object of immense value to find during their outdoor activities. The reason, of course, is that they are an ideal size (and just “gross” enough) for chucking at one another. Plus, showing one to a female student seems to be an easy way to elicit an absolutely ear-splitting scream. (In the interest of fairness, however, I should note that some of the girls do this to each other, which makes it seem as though their horror and revulsion is something of a selective response.) Clearly, the empty shells alone provide hours of entertainment. And while I don’t know just how old this “game” is, there’s a reference to them in the Tale of Genj (though it has less to do with cicada shell-throwing than it does with a lady shedding her outer robe to escape the overly-amorous main character). Personally, I think maybe the story would be better if it had some cicada shell-chucking, but maybe that’s just me.
Aside from gathering the discarded shells, however, another popular pastime in Japan is cicada-catching. This involves going out with your net and collecting as many cicadas as you can, in order to… be the best collector, I suppose. Bug catching as a whole is a popular hobby for children in Japan, no doubt due to the island’s plentiful supply of oversized and/or weird-looking insects and arachnids to find. (Mothra is a stretch, but not by quite as much as you’d think.) At any rate, it’s easy to see where the idea for games like Pokemon came from: it’s just a natural extension of what’s already a popular pastime for Japanese children. Minus the wandering around for months without parental supervision, anyway.
Of course, with the bug population being what it is, there’s plenty of things that get by through eating them, and perhaps the most numerous that I’ve seen are the bats. Now, I know that there are bats in Northern New York, as we’ve had a few in our attic over the years (a fact my mother can certainly vouch for), but I never really saw them in action until I came here. At twilight, you can see them, circling, swooping, and flapping their leathery wings over the many rice paddies in the area. The first time I saw them, I thought they were just a flock of large-ish birds, but once I saw them up close, I realized that not only were they bats, but there were an awful lot of them. If I were a more squeamish person, this would probably lead to nightmares and such, but as long as they don’t bother me, I’m fine with it. After all, they keep the mosquito population down, and in a country whose chief grain product is farmed in fields full of standing water, this is important. (I suppose that this would also be the place to mention that I’m looking forward to a certain movie about a certain bat-themed individual, but unfortunately, it won’t come out here for another three weeks.)
But while bugs and the things that eat them are all well and good, there are far more (and arguably more famous) creatures that can be touched upon… hopefully I’ll get to those in another article. Until then, I’ll be trying not to wake up in a panic from the cicadas’ song.
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