Teaching with Tim

Listening comprehension challenge: students performing Noh theater at last weekend's Meito Art Jam

A student is slouched in his chair, staring at the floor.  Maybe he’s having trouble with the English, or maybe he’s just tired, but the situation calls for a gentle “are you O.K.?” from the teacher.   I say it in Japanese: “Daijoubu desu ka?”  He looks up and starts laughing, and so do three other students in earshot.  I don’t think they’re laughing at my accent, or at the fact that I’m speaking Japanese–my pronunciation was at least ballpark, and I throw out snatches of Japanese in class all the time.  I also know that, at least according to the dictionary, my use of the phrase was correct—daijoubu desu ka does mean “are you okay?”  But there must have been some subtext to the phrase, some connotation that made it ill-suited to the situation.  Maybe it was too tender for a teacher to say to a student in Japan?  Or maybe, given the context and my intonation, it came across a little bit off, like “are you healthy?”  I still have no idea.  I have had similar problems with the phrase “mendokusai, ne?” which, by the book, means something like  “That’s a lot of bother, isn’t it? “ or “Too much work!”  So when a co-worker told me about having to grade papers over the weekend, I said it—but she laughed and said “no, no, don’t use that!”  I couldn’t get a clear explanation of why my usage had been wrong.  And then there’s the word yabai, which is an adjective/exclamation used heavily by high school students.  Though I have heard it hundreds of times, my understanding of its meaning only gets more muddled with time.  It can be used negatively, referring to something like homework (Yabai!); for something delicious, like custard pudding (Yabai!); to mean cool/handsome, like Brad Pitt (Oh, Yabai! Yabai!); or—from what I can tell—to describe basically anything.

This kind of confusion crops while learning any foreign language, I suppose, though Japanese feels foreign in a deeper way than German did.  If my brain is not forced to remember Japanese, it won’t.   It seems like it fundamentally doesn’t want to remember that yoyaku means reservation or that taikukan means gymnasium.  Any time my brain can get away with using the English word for these concepts—whether while thinking or speaking—it will.  I’ve heard that if you study a language hard enough, you start to think in it, but it seems like that point is still a long way off for me.  And of course it’s not just the difficulty of memorizing vocabulary, but of re-ordering my entire mode of expression.   It’s depressing when people tell me they can understand my Japanese because they’ve studied English—because they know what I’m trying to say.    If I say “custard pudding is cheap,” for example, but I want to add that it’s “delicious, too,” my first impulse would be to say oishii mo (delicious, too).  But you can’t do that in Japanese.  You have to say shika mo oishii, which translates to something like “that thing, in addition, is delicious”. The phrase Amerika no koto wo hanashite imashita means “We were talking about America,” but translates literally to something like “America’s thing we were talking about.”  And then there’s remembering to put san after everyone’s name (I’ve been here long enough that people have started to correct me when I forget), and saying yoroshiku onegaishimasu, which  translates to “please be kind to me,” every time I meet someone for the first time, am wished a happy new year, finish giving an announcement over the PA, or do about a hundred other things I can’t remember right now.

So learning Japanese has been frustrating in some ways, but I should also mention that it has been one of the most fascinating aspects of living here.  I carry a notebook with me to record new words, and I’ve picked up some interesting stuff.  The word riyuketsu, for example, means “bleeding,” but it can also be used to describe someone who is telling an embarrassing story—they are “bleeding” all over the place.  Seems like an apt analogy.  And a couple dinnertime phrases I’ve learned always get a laugh when I use them.  One is Dera Umya, which is Nagoya dialect for “this tastes good,” but is apparently used exclusively by elderly Nagoya men, so hearing it from my mouth sounds goofy.  On the opposite end of the spectrum is onaka pon pon, which is used by children and means “my stomach is full” in a way so cutesy that English can barely muster an equivalent—maybe something like “my tum tum is fooly wooly.”  Along with the fun new vocab, the way Japanese changes based on your relationship to the person you are speaking with is mind-boggling: there is a huge difference between “polite” Japanese (keigo) and casual Japanese.  I heard about a Japanese-American woman who grew up in California speaking only Japanese with her family but was never exposed to formal Japanese.  When she first entered a Japanese business setting, she could barely figure out what was going on.

My current language learning program consists of listening to podcasts, picking up random phrases in my notebook, trying to talk to colleagues at lunch, doing a few textbook pages a week, and going to tutoring for an hour on Sundays.   Better than nothing, for sure, but I know that I need to do more heavy lifting if I’m going to summit the Mt. Fuji of Japanese language learning: reading kanji.  To even begin to read a Japanese newspaper I need to memorize at least 1,500 discrete characters (of the 50,000+ that exist).   No wonder my Japanese students seem to spend half of their lives in “cram school.”  Japan claims to have the most complex writing system in the world, and it takes years of rote memorization to gain even a basic level of literacy.  I still wonder if simply using hiragana—the phonetic Japanese characters—to spell out words, then separating those words with spaces, as in English, wouldn’t be easier for everyone.  But several Japanese people have told me (emphatically) that kanji are absolutely necessary.  I guess I have to live with that.   Learning all those characters still seems almost impossible, but I’ll try to live up to the kanji for my name: 手夢   Pronounced “Te-Mu”, the first character means “hand,” and the second one means “dream,” so someone suggested that my name means “reaching for dreams.”  But another possible kanji-fication of my name is 手無　(“without hands”), so I won’t let my hopes get too high.

Kanji-dominating study habits: check out the tabbage on this third-year student's textbook

Rainier from the Edmonds Ferry

After ten days in Seattle, I’m back at it here in Nagoya.  How did Seattle feel after four months in Japan?  Speaking strictly in terms of the city itself, my impressions were varied: the cars seemed older, the streets wider, and the houses bigger.  After Nagoya’s dense zoning, everything felt unnecessarily spread out.   Driving by the undeveloped plots of dirt on the waterfront near the grain elevators made me sad for some reason—but I guess it always has.   There was more visible poverty on the streets than in Nagoya, and a much less efficient public transportation system.  With that said, Seattle has better parks, a more impressive urban center, and a superior natural backdrop (Rainier, the Cascades, the Olympics, and the Sound were all on stunning display in the clear winter air).

But this kind of comparison game is irrelevant I suppose—the feel of being home was all that really mattered, and that was defined by family and friends, not Sim City stats.   It was wonderful.  A sense of disconnection and isolation sometimes cast a shadow over my time in Japan, and being with some of the most important people in my life reminded me where that shadow came from—I knew that this was what I had been missing.

Some egotistical piece of me assumed that things would be the same as they were when I left for Japan in August—that, even though my life has been changing radically since then, things in Seattle would stand still—but as I caught up with family and friends, I was reminded that the whole world is spinning, not just my corner of it.  The city has a new mayor and a new light rail system.  Friends are changing career plans and choosing grad schools.  New health problems are cropping up for older family members, and my brother’s car got totaled.  I felt more out-of-the-loop than I ever did returning from L.A.  But at the same time, after 24 hours in Seattle, everything started snapping into place, and I started to feel like I’d never left.   I felt almost guilty about the ease with which I could now order from a restaurant or ask a Macy’s clerk to bring me a different shoe size.  Getting on the bus and talking to the bus driver in English somehow felt like cheating.  Street signs seemed strangely elementary.  It was nice.

Being home for the holidays was deeply refreshing, but it is already starting to seem like a long time ago.  The prospect of spending the next year in Japan is both exciting and daunting—I’m enjoying life back in Nagoya, but I still miss the stability and simplicity of home.

Why won't they just look at the camera?

Speech Contest Students

It’s finals week, so I’m spending most of my time proctoring tests—which has meant meeting groups of students I don’t usually see.  When I walked into the 3B classroom this morning with a pile of calculus tests in my hands, the students ogled me.  Giggles broke out in various corners of the room.  I felt very blond-haired, blue-eyed, and foreign.  Yet their surprise also reminded me that most of the students at Meito don’t react this way anymore.  I had almost forgotten about that disconcerting automatic-celebrity-effect that being a young white guy in Japan sometimes brings. Most of my students just see me as part of the landscape now.  And just as I am no longer “the young American teacher” to them, they are no longer just “Japanese students” to me.  School uniforms and a collaborative culture made it tempting to see them as a homogenous group initially.  But, of course, with time their individual personalities have begun to shine through.  There’s Akane, who studied in Australia for a year and speaks English with a strong Aussie accent.  Her accent seems even more striking when paired with Japanese mannerisms.  She’s very opinionated, and has announced that she “hates socks” a number of times.  I’m not sure where she picked up that unusual pet peeve, but apparently she feels strongly about it.   There’s Keiji, the only boy in my first-year class who always puts on the red Meito slippers provided at the door to my room (everyone else just takes off their shoes).  There’s Hideyuki, who often makes jokes involving the Japanese word for “toilet.”  I don’t know if being able to understand his jokes would make them funny to me or not.  But my favorite Hideyuki moment came during a conversation exercise in which the students were practicing invitations.  He didn’t have a partner, but insisted on going it alone, loudly: “Would you like to go to Karaoke with me this weekend?” (turns, as if to someone else): “Yes, Hideyuki, I would love to!”  No one was really paying any attention to him, but he happily finished the exercise solo.  And there’s Yumi, who gave a speech in English about the death of her father five months ago from cancer.  Although her audience may not have understood the whole speech, I think almost everyone teared up a little when she asked if we were making enough time in our lives for the people we loved.   There’s Aya, who always comes to school wrapped in a Mickey Mouse blanket and delights in correcting my failed attempts at Japanese, Hitomi who wears a lot of mascara and wants to start a punk rock band, Bina the exchange student from Nepal who speaks three languages—the list goes on.   I’ve changed the names here, but I’m happy to report that I know all of these students’ real names well enough to remember them for a long time.  There are still many names in my “alphabet soup” groups that I haven’t memorized, but finally I’m starting to see collections of individuated human beings instead of just “classes”—which makes working with them a lot more fun.   I’m getting past the language and cultural barriers and starting to figure out who my students are. 

I have met Westerners who’ve lived here for a long time who are frustrated with Japanese culture. They complain about the guarded and reticent social norms that make it difficult to strike up friendships, and about the fact that you can never really “become” Japanese in the way that you can become Canadian or American—that no matter what you do, you will always be at the outskirts of the society in some fundamental way.  These complaints are based on certain truths about Japan, I’m sure.  But I still believe that culture, while deeply rooted in our sense of who we are, is just something we wear on the surface.  Underneath, my Japanese students are a lot like my American students—trying to fit in, worried about the future, taking on different personalities from day to day.  It’s true that some of the similarities are because they are from the same generation and take in a lot of the same media (loving the Backstreet Boys and the Twilight movies seems to be standard for teenage girls on both sides of the Pacific).  But I think the same basic similarities can also be found between adult Westerners and adult Japanese people.  There’s a great book I just read called Polite Fictions: Why Americans and Japanese seem Rude to Each Other.  This link summarizes the book better than I can.  It was written by an American woman who has been married to a Japanese man for many years, and it suggests that the communication problems between Japanese people and Americans stem from a difference in “polite fictions,” or social assumptions.  The basic “polite” social assumption in American culture is “you and I are equal.”  So we see Obama chatting on TV with Katie Couric, cracking jokes occasionally, while she sits casually facing him with one leg crossed over the other.   American employees usually call their bosses by their first name, and when you visit an American home you are often encouraged to “help yourself,” rather than having everything served up for you.  In Japan, on the other hand, the basic “polite” social assumption is “I am in awe of you.”  So in a car, a guest is often seated in the back seat, alone, rather than in front with the driver.  People constantly lower their heads or bow to one another to show humility, and requests are often preceded by a self-deprecating apology, e.g.: “I’m a terrible cook, and my apartment is small, but if you could come over for dinner tonight I would appreciate it.” 

Yet while these differences in “polite fictions” can result in all kinds of misunderstandings, which are discussed at length in the book, the main lesson I took from it was that, after all, these different cultural norms are still based on “fictions.”  After you remove the layers of cultural, social, and language differences, we’re still just people trying to figure things out.  I guess I don’t know how true that actually is, but I hope that approaching my experience here with a positive, receptive attitude will keep me from getting frustrated like some of the people I’ve met.  And one thing I know for sure—if there really are big, thick sheets of cultural ice between me and the people I’m trying to connect with here, then the Japanese language is the best pickaxe available to me.  So I’m trying to keep up my study regimen… though learning the thousands of kanji characters it takes to read a Japanese newspaper still seems like a task beyond my powers. For now, keeping a Japanese conversation going for more than 45 seconds would be a good goal, I suppose…  Gambaritai desu (I’ll do my best).  

A chasm wide enough for a camry.

The first time I noticed something unusual about high school gender relations in Japan was before one of my classes in September.  While socializing before the bell, all the boys stood together and all the girls stood together.  No exceptions.  No outliers daring to cross over.  Just completely separate.  When I do a group conversation activity, where students are supposed to mill around and talk to each other in English, they usually segregate themselves in the same way.  I have to practically beg them to talk to one another: “Boys, talk to girls!  Girls, talk to boys!”  The school itself seems to actually encourage the segregation.  The required school uniform is very gendered: girls wear grey skirts and white blouses; boys wear dark slacks and sport coats.  There are no school dances whatsoever.  PE is always separated by gender.  And, of course, this reflects the cultural climate of the country as a whole.  With my first-year students, I’m assigning a cooking project—they have to make a food of their choice and teach their classmates to make it in English.  When I first gave the assignment, two girls came up to me and said, “The boys don’t cook.”  They told me this as a serious statement of fact—something they wanted to make sure their foreigner teacher knew.  And cooking is just one of many activities that remains heavily divided by gender in Japan.  I’ve never seen a female bus driver.  Or a female school administrator. 

There has been some U.S. media buzz about this phenomenon—I have seen several articles in The New York Times about Japan’s relatively slow progress on the gender equity front.  It’s a common truism that the high school years are as the best years of a Japanese woman’s life—because they experience a sense of freedom that is not repeated for them in adult life.   Yet when asked to tell me about their goals, many of the high school girls I teach simply say “getting married” and “having children”.  When I taught girls about the same age in the U.S., answers like “become a lawyer” were more common.  Of course, teenagers often just spit back the expectations that are handed to them.   I don’t know enough about gender issues in Japan to jump into the fray here with opinions and prescriptions.  As a teacher, I try to treat boys and girls equally and have high expectations for both—but as a visitor to Japan, I try to be an observer, not a critic.  And I don’t want to paint an overly simplistic picture.  I’ve heard there has been some improvement on gender issues in Japan in the past ten years, and I know many high school girls here who are very outspoken and conscious of their potential as young women.  There are some deep cultural forces at play in all this that I don’t completely understand.  And besides, the U.S. is no egalitarian utopia, either.  But I guess there’s enough of the American feminist movement in me to make me wonder about what I see sometimes. 

 I’m not winning any crusades for women’s rights, but teaching and Japanese daily life are continue to treat me well.  Here are a couple of recent shots:    

Fall colors during a hiking trip in Gifu Prefecture

A common sight of the season: persimmons hanging outside to sweeten.

This man DOES cook: Ron-Sensei produces another masterpiece of Asian cuisine.

Meito High School as seen from my apartment balcony

     I guess I haven’t written much about my day-to-day teaching life yet.  Initially, I found it hard to characterize because it feels so fragmented compared to last year.  I see 12 different groups of students over the course of each week.  8 of those groups I see only once.  These are “general majors”—high school students whose focus is not English.  They are designated by letters (1A, 1B, 1C, etc.), so previous American teachers have referred to them as “the alphabet soup classes.”  Because I see them so seldom, it is hard to learn their names or keep track of where each class left off.  There is one group of students who, because of class cancellations and infrequent meetings, I have still only seen four times—though I have been teaching for nearly two months.  The three groups of “English Majors” I see twice per week (one group per grade—high school in Japan being three years long, starting at the equivalent of the U.S. sophomore year).  And I also have a group of four students in my public speaking elective, which meets three times per week. 

     It’s tough to talk about my experience as a teacher here generally—I work with some students who know a lot of English, and some students who know almost none.  There are some groups I know well because I see them often, and other groups who still feel unfamiliar when they walk through the door.  Some are extremely studious and motivated—particularly first-year students—while others seem distracted.  My third-year (high school senior) students are completely consumed by their upcoming college exam, and they seem to have little patience with homework for other classes.  They are good kids, but mentally a few of them have already checked out of high school. 

My class sizes are small (no more than 22 students), and unlike many other teachers at Meito, I am always teaching in the same room.  In Japanese schools, generally speaking, teachers move from room to room, while students stay in the same room.   But, perhaps because Meito wanted to accommodate its visiting American teachers, Ron and I have classes that come to us.   Also, almost half of our teaching day is planning periods— this is fairly standard for Japanese high school teachers, and I must say that I like it.

     That’s the general shape of things, but I guess it still doesn’t give you a picture of the day-to-day reality.  So, though it may be way more detail than anyone really wants to know, here’s a snapshot of what I did yesterday:

7:30: Walked from apartment to Meito (5 minutes).  Took off shoes at the door and switched to slippers.  Deposited street shoes in my personal cubby (#40) in the massive shoe storage area at the door.  I ordered my “bento” (school box lunch) in the office—410 yen.  Greeted students (many of whom are already at school studying) and colleagues with Ohayo Gozaimasu (good morning).  When a male speaker says this phrase, it often shortened to something that sounds more like “zay-massss.” 

7:45-8:40: Finished planning the day in the teacher office.  At Meito, all the teachers spend their off-periods working in a big communal office, complete with green-tea dispensing water cooler. 

8:45-9:35: A musical bell sounds across the campus and lets everyone know that school has begun.  I taught my speech elective.  We did a warm up where the students had to give a short speech in English to their teacher about why they forgot their homework, then went to the computer lab and worked on outlining and researching the persuasive speeches they’re working on.

9:45-10:35: Taught my third-year English majors.  We started out by talking about gerunds and doing some exercises from the textbook, then did some conversation exercises where they had to interview one another about their zodiac signs.  We spent the last twenty minutes talking about Halloween—I showed them some pictures from Halloween in the U.S. and a short national geographic video clip on the history of Halloween, and then we played a game that involved practicing imperative phrases and eating candy.  Homework was to write about whether they believed in ghosts in their English journals. 

10:45-11:35: Planning period.  Graded journals and made copies of worksheets.

11:45-12:35: Had lunch with another teacher in the office and practiced my Japanese while she practiced her English.  (My Japanese is much, much worse than her English.)  Mostly we stuck to simple topics—food, what we did on the weekend, holidays.  One teacher, fluent in both Japanese and English, noticed this and jokingly suggested “The American and Japanese health insurance systems” as our next topic.  We took him up on it—I didn’t pick up many specifics, but I learned enough about the Japanese system to know that it’s probably better than ours.    

12:35-1:10: Met with a third-year student and gave her a mock-college entrance interview.  Many students have to complete college interviews in English, so they’re eager for practice.

1:15-2:05: Team-taught an English essay class.  I don’t have to actually plan for this class—I’m just the token native English speaker who grades all the essays. 

2:15-3:05:  Taught one of my “alphabet soup” classes.   We went over the homework, then played some games where the kids had to practice the different forms of “can” in English (could, couldn’t, can’t).  One of them involved collecting signatures from classmates in a timed race, and they seemed to like it. 

3:15-4:30: Hosted my English / German “language club”.  Every teacher at Meito is strongly encouraged to run at least one “club,” and this is mine—we practiced a few German phrases, then watched a kids’ movie (Holes) in English and talked about it. 

4:40: Left school and walked to the dentist for a check up on the wisdom tooth I had pulled yesterday.  The total cost of the extraction was the equivalent of US $21.  The same procedure in Seattle would have probably been over $300. 

Evening: Went for a run, made dinner, studied some Japanese. 

A standard work day, I guess—though the schedule changes, and every day brings a new twist.  It still feels like everything is in flux here, and my teaching life still hasn’t really taken on a consistent shape.  But I’m enjoying it—good kids, helpful colleagues, and lots of opportunities to learn and grow.  Loneliness and homesickness still lurk around the edges of things, creeping in during quiet moments, but nothing I can’t handle so far.     

Nagoya from the “Sky Tower”

Nagoya is starting to feel like home–sort of.  People can get used to anything.  Already, things that used to seem new, exotic, and unfamiliar have begun the fade to beige—they’re part of the routine now.  A few examples:

• Hitting my head on low doorways. 
• Sorting all my garbage into different bins for burnables, non-burnables, and two types of recyclables.
• Not being able to read menus in restaurants.
• Trying foods I can’t identify.
• Saying itadakimasu (literally “I’m ready to receive”) before beginning to eat.   
• Always cleaning my hands with a hot towel before eating. 
• Eating with chopsticks.
• Never having paper towels in public restrooms.  
• Keeping a personal towel on hand at all times.
• Taking the bus and subway everywhere.
• Knowing that the bus and the subway will arrive on time.
• Bringing an umbrella when its raining or even looks like rain.
• Being one of the only people I know who uses a rain jacket.    
• Being lost all the time. 
• Taking my shoes off in my apartment, at school, in traditional Japanese restaurants, and just about everywhere.
• Bowing (or at least dipping my head) in a wide variety of social contexts.
• Being stared at by small children.
• Leaving my laptop, projector, and other valuables unsecured at school, confident that no one will take them. 
• Avoiding bicycles on the sidewalk.
• Looking to the left first when crossing the street.   
• Carrying coins in a coin purse. 
• Being welcomed and greeted and offered help constantly. 

All of this now seems normal to a certain extent.  More subtle differences—like the contrasts between Western and Eastern social norms—will take longer to master.  Referring to myself in the third person in conversation and calling colleagues the equivalent of “Mr. Schlosser” (“Sato-san, Suzuki-san,” etc.) even when we’re at a party still feels weird. But I already feel pretty comfortable with Japanese life.  There’s a safety and civility to the culture that I appreciate.  The food is delicious, the people are courteous, and the country is beautiful—there have been a few times when I’ve felt that Japan is only a few short steps away from paradise.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to call it home in the true sense of that word, and I guess it’s possible that there will come a time when everything fades to beige—when the excitement is gone and I just miss friends, family, and familiar things.  Already, especially when I’m alone in my apartment, I often have those feelings.  But the excitement of working with the students at Meito and exploring Nagoya still has the power to put that on the backburner most of the time.   Here are a few recent shots:   

Students give a presentation on Japanese pop star Kaera Kimura

Moving the god's carriage--part of last weekend's Nagoya festival

The paradisal world of Meiji-Mura, a full-scale recreation of Meiji-era Japan

Kyoto Locals

Whenever I read about other people’s experiences abroad, they always seem to be defined by two opposite poles: excitement and alienation.  Broadly speaking, I guess the two extremes look something like this:

Excitement: I’m far away from home!   Everything’s different!  I can’t read anything! 

Alienation: I’m far away from home.  Everything’s different.  I can’t read anything.

So far, I’ve managed to keep the exclamation points in my Japan experience.  I’ve pushed myself to meet new people, explore new places, and learn the language, usually managing to resist the temptation of retreat into a cocoon of American DVDs and pizza.  However, this apparent display of self-control has mostly been enabled by the fact that I still don’t have the internet at my apartment.  The story of why I don’t have the internet is painfully boring—suffice it to say that language and culture barriers have played a role.  So I can either sit on my bed and feel sorry for myself, or I can go outside and do something.  The latter is just the more attractive option. 

My most recent expedition was a weekend spent in Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara—I saw so much so fast that it was almost overwhelming.  A few times in Kyoto the sense of other-worldliness was so strong that I actually felt disoriented—Where am I?  Is this place real? Geisha still walk around in the streets?  Stone footpaths between buildings that look old enough to be stuffed with samurai?  I guess I didn’t really believe that such a place could still exist. 

I put together some pictures and video clips from my first month in Japan in this quick slideshow.

I made myself a promise when I came to Japan that my number one goal was to Be Alive.  I’m prone to getting stuck in my head—to letting experience number two and experience number three slip by while I’m still trying to figure out what experience number one meant.  Japan has been such a flood of new experiences and growth that the very idea of picking through it all and pulling out something notable to analyze is totally overwhelming at the moment.   But Meito just had its school festival—three days of food, performances, and competitions that the students prepare for all year—and I thought I’d at least share a few pictures.  I had some technical problems with the editing at the end, but this slideshow (which includes the goofy festival theme song in the background) gives you a taste.

From the American Airlines in-flight tracker...

There are times when life seems to drag by slowly, and times when it seems to be rushing by so fast that you can’t keep up.  For me, the past 48 hours have been in the second category. 

It began at gate 42 in LAX, waiting for my flight to Tokyo.  A large group of Japanese middle school students, all in identical blue T-shirts, started filing in.   They had been in L.A. on some kind exchange program, and they were chatting in Japanese so fast that I could hardly believe their words were actually intelligible to one another.  A clear thought crossed my mind: It has begun. 

I ended up sitting next to one of the students on the plane, and I practiced a bit of Japanese with him.   He was incredibly polite and mature—“Jozu desu!” (You’re very good!) he said, falsely complimenting my terrible Japanese.  He listened patiently to my inane Japanese 101 conversation starters (Where are you from?  Did you like America?) and answered them in slow, clearly enunciated Japanese that I still failed to understand.  To my American middle school teacher eyes, his politeness seemed so beyond his years I dubbed him “Little Grandfather” in my head. He and his classmates wanted to grill me on English idioms, and they asked me what “Excuse you” meant.  I saw this as my first teaching test, and I tried to explain when one would say “Excuse me” versus “Excuse you.”  I ended up resorting to sloppy ballpoint pictures of stick figures farting and excusing each other.  They liked that (“Very exciting!” said Little Grandfather).  I went on to explain the definition of the English idiom “cut the cheese,” which they promised to memorize. 

After 11 hours in flight, I caught my first glimpse of Japan’s central island, Honshu, emerging bright and lush under the clouds.  “There’s a lot of green!” Little Grandfather told me.  He and his classmates erupted in applause when the plane touched down in Tokyo.  A country they’re happy to return to, I thought. That’s a good sign.  And so far I’ve found that they had good reason to be happy.  My first impression has been of an advanced, clean country full of polite and thoughtful people. I know that this simplistic assessment will change and evolve with time, but for the moment I’m in love with the place.  A few quick examples:

• My Japan Air flight to Nagoya was delayed—from 6:00 to 6:05.  The agent at the ticketing gate came out at 6:01 and apologized profusely in both English and Japanese for the fact that the plane would not be ready for another four minutes.  Then, at exactly 6:05, he and four other JAL ticketing agents came out and bowed in perfect unison before ushering us aboard.  We ended up arriving in Nagoya five minutes early.  
  
• An airport employee in Nagoya walked the entire length of the terminal to personally get me the change I needed for a 10,000 yen note in order to operate the passport picture machine. 
  
• When I dropped my suitcase in an elevator, the woman next to me rushed to pick it up, putting down all of her own bags in the process.
  
• Store workers are endlessly courteous.  At the entrance to every store I enter, whether staffed by an elderly woman or a teenager with long bleached hair, I’m greeted with Irrashaimase! (Welcome!) and all the help I could ever need.  (The only exception to this I’ve found so far is McDonald’s).  
  
• A man I asked for help finding the subway station near my house not only seemed happy to meet my request, but actually followed me there to make sure I made it. 
  
• The teachers from Meito who picked me up arrived with a typed schedule detailing what I would be doing for each hour of the day.  They had prepared an entire folder full of materials specifically for me, and they spent the whole day doing everything from helping me get my registration card to teaching me how to operate my shower.    
  

I guess some part of me held onto the naïve expectation that everything in Japan would be a little different but basically the same.  The influence of the west is clearly visible, but the unfamiliar is still outweighing the familiar for me.  A few culture shock moments:     

• I was sitting on the toilet in my hotel room.  Curious about a little button with a picture of a sprinkler on it, I press it.  Luckily, I had heard about this unique sanitation device before, so I wasn’t shocked enough to jump up screaming.  But it was still an unusual place to be squirted with a high-pressure blast of hot water.
  
• The “pillow” (stone) in my hotel “room” (closet) was just one its unusual features—the electrical system was impossible to decipher.  Switches everywhere.  Combinations of up to three different buttons required to turn on lights.  I ended up stumbling around with my REI headlamp and iPod, unable to turn on a single one of the room’s many lights.  I knew they worked, but they just wouldn’t work for me.     
  
• Here’s a conversation I had with a woman in an airport elevator.  I’ve translated it from the Japanese to the best of my ability:

Woman in Elevator: Where did you come from?

Me: Los Angeles.

Woman: Something something something.

Me: Yes?

Woman: Something?

Me: Yes.

Woman: Somethingelse?

Me: Yes!

Woman: Something!  Something. Somethingelseveryfast.

Me: Yes! Thank You!

Woman: You’re welcome.

I wish I were writing about all this in some other form besides bulleted lists, but everything is happening so fast, and I feel like I have enough material for a hundred blog posts. Not all of the culture shock has been fun—I got carsick from driving on the left side of the road, I’m still not proficient with chopsticks, and it’s so hot and humid that I feel like I’m losing a gallon of water in sweat every five minutes—but I’m still in awe of this place.  Of course I have heard about the less awe-inspiring elements of the culture.  The social distance that all that politeness actually implies.  The difficulty getting students to speak and think independently in class.  The challenge of learning the language.  The bureaucracy.  The closet nationalism.  The misogyny and xenophobia.  But I want to hold onto my excitement about this experience, however naïve it may be, because I believe that new experiences often give you what you expect of them, and if I work hard to learn about this place and these people, I’ll get more back.  Maybe I’ll end up looking back on this post as I sometimes do on my reports from Los Angeles—how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I sounded, how silly and idealistic—but I know that the experience can go one of two ways (or anywhere in between): on the one hand, you can end up giving up on the language, spending all your time with other foreigners, and feeling like a permanent outsider.  On the other hand, you can learn the language, make Japanese friends, and get an inside view of a fascinating culture.  So my glowing assessment of what I’ve seen so far is, in a way, a defense mechanism—a way of keeping my focus on sustaining the effort it will take to make the most of this.  I know there will be times when I miss my family, my friends, readable street signs, and microwavable burritos.  I know I’ll get lonely.  But for the moment I’m feeling good about being here, and I want to hold onto that for as long as I can.