Hindsight

When teachers have their classes, they tote along with them whatever they need. In the junior high schools I work at, students don’t move from class to class like back home in the States – the teachers do. In this case, Morizono-sensei’s goods include a Peko-san mini-lunchbox.

Switching from school to school usually features the spontaneous first day back. Recently it’s returning to a school and not knowing what classes I would have scheduled the first day.

Today I had four. Thankfully none were too spontaneous. I had first period to come up with an idea for a selection class. Apparently I must be accustomed now because 45 minutes was enough.

I must have been masochistic, vulnerable or both – after school two English club kids came up to me asking me if I could go to English club. I nodded and smiled, which resulted in staying at school until about 5:15. Not bad at all and I had fun with the kids playing a word game that even the 1-nensei could figure out. Good times.

After school I was on my way towards Shimonosone Station until one of the math teachers offered to drive me there. I accepted, got to the station and realized that I was short fifty yen of getting a train ticket back to Kokura Station.

Problem: I had no spare cash.

I ended up walking a block further, waiting for a bus back to Kokura, and took it past home down to the station. After feeling the burn of a long day and the absence of money, I withdrew from my U.S. bank account via a Postal Service ATM at Kokura Eki. I then walked to Koichi’s and made up for the day.

Yakitori was abundant and a full bottle of Umeshu was consumed by yours truly, with the exception of a glass or two by a fellow patron who I chatted it up with. It was nice to unwind and speak about 90% in Japanese to everyone and anyone around me, a far cry from speaking mostly eigo (English) at school. Especially when it was a with someone new, with discussions on the hurdles of “test only” studying, a common interest in film, etcetera etcetera.

One of the great nights at Yakyuudori I suppose. I mean, where else could I have walked in [early] at 6 o’clock and been served a pre-dinner “fish fry”? Koichi is a godsend.

With a few hours extra of sleep and a “late” wake up time of 10pm, I spent the day doing little, save for watching two films on DVD. “tokyo.sora” and “Bounce Ko Gals”.

Tokyo Sora revolves around six women and their desire for relationship and connection.

Bounce Ko Gals is the story of a high school graduate who is robbed and must get her money back in one night to leave Japan.

Both films are, for lack of a better phrase, all over the place. “Sora” is too slow and “Bounce” cannot be taken seriously. It’s a sad thing because I was hoping to find some gratification from at least one of these features. I wasn’t able to sit still for both – instead I found myself leaving to the kitchen to keep from being hungry.

I think part of it has to do with the subtitling as well – the subs for “Bounce” were so rough that I spent half the time not watching, but figuring them out based on context.

For “Bounce”, the nice surprise was seeing Koji Yakusho, the lead actor in Masayuki Suo’s “Shall We Dance?”, which is one of my favorite Japanese films. In addition to his acting, Hitomi Sato also does a good performance.

While I was able to see these two in a good light throughout “Bounce”, the film’s rough cinematography and inconsistent editing gave me headaches.

With a few hours before the evening is over I’ll have to plug in to something that will make me feel like I didn’t waste my Saturday. Like I said, I’d hoped to enjoy both films. Instead I feel lost thinking about them.

On some evenings I will return home, either slightly buzzed or terribly drunk, from a dinner filled with yakitori and alcohol to boot. Last night was one of those nights.

I haven’t seen Koichi for two weeks, since Katrina came to see Kitakyushu – it has become customary to take any of my friends there for dinner. It’s just the greatest place to relax, eat and drink well.

“Ohisashiburi!” he hollered. I walked through as usual, fit my jacket onto one of the hangers and sat by Tim and Yuki. Kondo followed shortly by asking me what I wanted to start off with. I spent a few seconds wondering.

“Nama”. Draft (beer) if you will. He passed me a notepad and a pen and I wrote down my starting selections for dinner.

It’s one of those treasured things really. Every week I go to Koichi’s. You probably know that by now after infinite mentions of his joint.

Today was otherwise boring – I had one 1-nensei class with Takeuchi sensei and spent the rest of the day in front of my laptop. I have now physically taped an ethernet cable from the wall, trailing on the floor, to my nearby desk. No one seemed to mind. I had so much free time I played people on Yahoo! Games in both their rendition of Battleship and Checkers.

This evening I decided to stay home – the desire to rest hung over me this entire week, especially in the latter half. The absence of hustle in the staff room probably added to it (too quiet?). On a good note, I did get this weblog up to speed and done. Not in vain.

Yesterday afternoon in one of my 1-nensei classes, Sato-kun asked me what the word “fuck” meant. He simply said the word that his friend told him to say. I made an X with my forearms that meant “dame” in Japanese or “no”. Once Takeuchi-sensei translated to him that it was a profane word he put his hands together and said to me, “Ohh, sorry.” I told him not to sweat it – he didn’t know what he was saying in the first place.

“Shut up!” and “Fuck you!” have a mainstay in English education for some reason. This week I was grading pairs for their dialogue practice. One of them ended like this:

A: “…can I borrow it?”
B: “No, sorry.”

B-san finished up while A-san then decided to flip his middle finger at the guy. I told Yoshimura-sensei to tell him not to do that hand gesture again. Not realizing the gravity of his simple gesture, he did it again.

The kids must be getting our expressions from movies and whatever other media they can get their hands on. Most likely television – I can’t think of any other place out here they’d pick it up. Certainly they don’t just hear it off the street or on the radio.

—
Today was a twist on interpretation. Each student had their own card with three pieces of information: a place, a time and an action. So students would have to go up to others and ask “Do you have any plans for the holidays?” and the other would respond with whatever was on his or her card.

I was walking around the class, listening to kids exchanging information via english in addition to being asked as well.

“Do you have any plans for the holidays?” asked one of my kids.
“Yes… I’m going to go visit Yamaguchi next Sunday.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to swim at the beach.”

He started to write down the information. With another friend in tow, they spoke amongst themselves to recall what I told them.

(in Japanese)
A: “What did he say?”
B: “He said swim… swim at the biatch.”

I let out this small laugh and said “Umm, don’t say that.” And then I realized why he said that – he was just pronouncing the word beach in some ways like a Japanese would read a japanese word written in english (otherwise known as romaji). Beach = be – ah – ch.

He stopped writing out the word beach when I told him not to say it. After some confusion, I told him he was spellling beach right and then voiced the proper pronunciation.

I think it’s safe to say that I was a little worried since this week had it’s share of profane english slang.

The three 1-nensei classes I had today went pretty well. This time, to get their alphabet practice up to par we did hangman with lunch groups as teams. Typically a class has six lunch groups of five or six kids each.

Since they don’t know any words in English just yet we had Japanese words in romaji (English spelling) as words in question.

It’s pretty interesting what kind of words a group would consider to stump the rest of the class. I don’t remember the exact spelling, but the Japanese longname for “North Korea” was so long I had a hard time filling in the letters every time a student guessed a correct one. Also interesting was the fact that one kumi (class) picked up the pattern of choosing vowels first every time we tried new words. Good Wheel of Fortune candidates.

Having an impact on their start of junior high school English feels like a big responsibility, even if I’m just an assistant teacher. Sometimes it feels like quite the privilege.

After my classes I spent the rest of the day adding entries from past blogs into this system. For the most part, everything is here now. The months that are missing though are marked in personal memory as a dark time, a very unpleasant time when I was home and going through a lot of personal drama. Let it be forgotten.

There wasn’t much else to do at school – the 3-nensei (including teachers and our principal) were off on the shinkansen to Kyoto for their school trip. The morning meeting was humorously quiet (“sabishii desu ne” – “it’s lonely isn’t it?”) and the day just felt more laid back then most with the lack of hustle around the staff room.

For a “change of pace” I had some McDonald’s for dinner – back home you wouldn’t catch me ever having a Big Mac – I’d have options. Burger King, Del Taco and what have you. This evening I had some chicken nuggets. Dining in style. Dining in comfort.

David messaged me while me and my laptop were connected at school. I later checked out what the fuss was about – his illustrations appear in an independent film. You go, boy.

I had two classes today, leaving me with a bit of free time. So I uploaded weblog entries from journals past. I’m still working on it, but you can see that the archive has suddenly grown from five entries in one month to over 250 entries in a span of almost three years.

The 3-nensei are off to Kyoto for the week starting tomorrow, Wednesday, until Friday. Shima-kun said he’d bring me back some omiyage. He even went as far to say he was going to bring me back a big buddha. While I’m appreciative, I have images of me trying to load an oversized buddha onto the bus I take home everyday.

My school schedule has already been referred to and altered several times today. Both Yoshida and Takeuchi sensei want to have me in their classes as much as possible this week. Today I was supposed to have three or four classes, but the slots got filled and I co-taught five. It’s sixth period now (roku jikanme) and I have a breather.

Yoshimura’s 3-nensei kids are doing a really good job with their speaking practice. I let them know at the end of class that they made me happy whipping out some great ideas for their dialogues. Good times.

I am meeting up with Alex after school to have some kaitenzushi and home to carry on with my task list, which involves the usual laundry detail, burning some CDs for a friend back home and pushing in a little bit of gaming, if at all possible.

Huzzah! (Kitakyushu Riverwalk)