Some Advice

Here's some advice for you: If you're teaching a kid English, and you ask him what animal he likes, and he says "blue," don't reply with "Are you serious?"

The First 100 Days

December 3rd marked my 100th day in Japan. The first thirty days felt like 200, but when I really think about it I feel like the time has gone by pretty quickly. I’m very pleased with Japan and with Hitachi, and I’ve only encountered one major problem: It’s absolutely freezing here. I give myself a pep talk every morning before I go out to toughen up so that I don’t reinforce the stereotype about people from Southern California being soft. Unfortunately, the pep talk never works. With that, here are my three favorite things about my life in Japan so far:

--Any Japanese-related American comedy. Especially the SNL skit with Chris Farley on a Japanese game show, “Lost in Translation,” and Dave Chappelle’s “Blackzilla” sketch from season one of “Chappelle’s Show.”

I cut my foot on a piece of glass, and I went to the drug store to get Neosporin or its Japanese equivalent. When I got to the drug store, I realized that not only could I not read any of the boxes, but that I wouldn’t be able to explain myself without taking my shoe off and putting my bloody foot on the counter. Eventually, I decided to gamble on a box that had a picture of a crying baby on one side and a happy baby on the other. I should have been more frustrated and probably a little bit more concerned by the whole ordeal, but it’s hard to be frustrated when you’ve got an image of Chris Farley yelling “For the love of God I don’t speak Japanese!” playing in your head.

In another incident, I dropped my camera into a pitcher of beer in a tragic karaoke accident. When it finally turned itself back on three days later, there was a golden haze over every picture that made everything look slightly more pleasant. My camera literally had beer goggles on. I took it to the camera shop down the street, and I sheepishly explained myself to the girl that spoke English. She handed it over to the four other people in the store, who took turns laughing, snapping pictures, and joking in Japanese with each other for a solid two minutes. When they stopped, the English speaker turned to me and asked, “Do you have a warranty card?” Again, if I hadn’t seen the commercial scene from “Lost in Translation,” my day would have been a lot worse.

And every day, I feel respected and feared in a way that I have never felt at home. I can’t really relate to the “Blackzilla” sketch in any other way, but it always makes me laugh and I feel slightly more in on the joke than I did before I came here.

--Windansea. I wrote about Windansea in my first entry, and I’ll have to give it its own entry to do it justice. But I will say that when I found out that “OJ Simpson: If I Did It” was canceled, I went to Windansea because it’s the only place in Japan that could cheer me up. By the way, I once watched a team of midgets race against an elephant in an airplane pull on FOX. And, more relevantly, I used to tune into FOX every day after school because they had the most extensive post-trial OJ coverage. (Yes, I watched the OJ trial every day when I was in middle school.) All I’m saying is, if you’re going to shamelessly promote a double murder, you might as well go all the way with it. And if it wasn’t in poor taste to pay the ghost-writer to write the book, then I don’t see how it is in poor taste for America to watch the television special. Damn you, Rupie Murdoch.

--My Job. It’s a long day, and it’s a long week, but it’s a good time. Here are a few of my favorite anecdotes:
During parent observation week, a mom got really into coming up with “cr-“ words for Phonics Hot Potato (cracker, crow, etc.) After a dry spell, she started clapping her hands excitedly to get her son’s attention. When he couldn’t come up with the word, she just yelled it for him: “Crap!”

In one of my Mommy and Me classes, one kid just spends the entire forty-five minutes sprinting around the classroom. He sometimes participates in the lessons, screaming “blue!” or “red!” if he sees a color that he recognizes. The only thing that ever slows him down is when he slips and runs into the wall. I know that the mom is waiting for me to discipline him, but I’m so impressed by the kid’s endurance that I don’t say anything. The kid is impressive… unlike that chump Kento, who runs for the first fifteen minutes and then falls asleep ten minutes later. And yeah, it’s really fun to call a three-year-old kid a chump.

I teach a group of three middle school girls that are considered bilingual even though they almost never actually speak. One of them has literally never spoken two English words together in class. If I ask a question that requires more than a one-word answer, she will stare at me for long enough that I break and ask someone else. One day, when none of them would speak at all, I broke the silence with, “You know, I should be mad right now. And I kinda am. But I respect what you’re doing here, even if it makes me a terrible teacher.” They all started laughing at that…and then went silent for the rest of the class. When we got their test scores, they were the three highest scorers at the school. So it turns out I’m great at teaching English.

In one of my high school classes, there’s a kid that always comes in late, if at all. I asked the kids if they wanted to bet on whether or not Yoshitaka was going to show up. One of the kids said, “Oh, he maybe will show up, but maybe we wait until yesterday, no, no, uh..tomorrow, maybe we wait until tomorrow for him.”
“Oh, a joke. Right. Nice work Shotaro.”

My boy Hiromu is in a class with another 3-year-old that lived in New York for a year and a half, and whose English is very good. Hiromu’s really good at punching me in the legs and randomly taking his shirt off during the lesson, but his English is not much better than that of the average three-year-old non-native English speaker. Things usually start getting ugly in our lesson when we progress from learning new words to putting them in sentences. At this point, Hiromu usually starts screaming in Japanese and walks outside to tell his mom that he’s hungry, sleepy, or angry (the other 3-year-old translates for me.) During parent observation week, Hiromu had his best meltdown ever. I asked the kids to take out their Main Cards. Hiromu’s mom hadn’t separated the day’s main cards from the big deck, so she suggested that he share with Anon. Hiromu LOST HIS MIND. He threw the deck of main cards at his mom, ripped his shirt off, and started screaming and crying while he tore up every loose piece of paper he could find. As his mom got up the courage to slow him down, he started punching her and screaming all kinds of Japanese at her. My manager eventually came in and dragged him out of the room while he kicked and punched the air. This whole ordeal lasted about ten minutes, during which he had managed to take off his jacket, two shirts, and one sock.

So that’s my first 100 days in Japan. I’m going to be logging a lot of time in front of my space heater in the next 100 days.