Keeping up with the Joneses

It's the first day of winter here, and it's still snowing. Blizzards raged across my mountain top high school all day, dropping at least six inches of snow. I got to watch the progress in water breaks from my day of playing soft volleyball on a team with some of my students. They were, of course, phenomenal, and we very nearly won the tournament that had been organized for our end of semester sports day. A highlight had to be that one of the kids on my team was named "Genki," so when he made a particularly heinous serve/spike, I would delight in screaming "GENKI DESHO!" at the top of my lungs. It's a Japanese pun that basically equates to "it's good, I tell you!"

As I left the high school, the storm appeared to have dried up for the day, but it had done it's job as my deep footprints from my wandering about in the haka yesterday had completely vanished when I walked through today on the way to the BOE. The extra few inches on and around all of the tombstones is bringing them ever closer to being erased. The bottom, tiered portions of them have become amorphous blobs that are seamlessly flowing into the thick layer of snow on the ground around them, and their growing white afros are growing dangerously close to the snow on the ground. I imagine that when the two meet up, from above and below, the memorials will be gone entirely, leaving what was once a graveyard as an undulating mass of white.

By the time I had finished putting in an appearance at the BOE, the snow had started up once again, coming down in thick pellets like hail, looking almost like corn raining down in the green-yellow glow of the parking lot lights. A couple of these weird pellets piled up in my outstretched hand, and when I crunched them between thumb and forefinger, they felt like the world's smallest snowballs. And, of course, as I write this now, it is still snowing outside.

That ain't really the point of this, though. I try to make these things pertinent or theoretical or at least interesting in some vaguely literary way, but I'm throwing all that out into the snow tonight. In just under 24 hours, my father and my brother will be landing in Tokyo. Though on a conceptual level I've known that they would be visiting me here in Japan for quite some time now, I think the emotional impact of it is catching up to me pretty late in the game--as is often the case with me. I'm only now feeling the implications of all this: of them being in a country where they've got no hope of speaking the language. Of me getting to see them in just over a day when they land at Chitose near Sapporo and I get to be their obnoxious, Canadian welcoming party...

I'm kind of freaking out.

It's part awesome. They're going to be here, in my podunk, little, snowy town. They're going to have the chance to see how I live here. I'm going to have the opportunity to show them Japan. Together, we're going to see Hiroshima and Kyoto and Tokyo for the first time. And, what's more, we've never done anything remotely like this together, us guys, since way back when Craig and I were rugrats. The Jonezer Family Vacation. Keeping up with the Joneses. Something like that.

And it's part terrifying. I'm not sure what "ready" is supposed to feel like, but I'm pretty sure this ain't it. I've got a notion of what I'll do with them up here in Hokkaido, but once we get down to Honshu and Kansai, I haven't the foggiest beyond hotel reservations. I mean, I've got brochures and guidebooks, and you can't sneeze in Kyoto without having to apologize to something old and historic and uniquely Japanese, but I still feel like I should have some epic schedule of Japanimated fun drafted up.

Well, if nothing else, it will be an adventure. I suppose that if I can manage to keep them fed, alive, and rested, they'll be fine with whatever we get up to as they are both remarkably laid back people.

But...yeah. That's me tonight. Ecstatic and terrified. Blown away and concerned. Thanks for putting up with it. I promise to get back to something interesting soon.

The Halloween that Wasn't

Well, despite the fact that the Japanese most definitely do not celebrate Halloween, I'd be damned if I wasn't going to hook it up for the kiddies over here.

I figured my greatest Halloween victory would occur at the Elementary School. They're usually the ones who have the least structure, meaning I have the most freedom of what particular Englishism I want to impart to the littleuns. I envisioned an all-day Halloweenfest, with the kiddies showing up in whatever costumes they could smack together. I didn't expect much since, as I already mentioned, the Japanese don't celebrate Halloween. And apparently my coordinator at the elementary thought the same for the same reason. She told me that there was no way we could have a Halloween extravaganza on the Friday before Halloween because A) all the students would be far too busy diligently preparing for their school festival on Sunday November 1st and B) there was no way any of them would have any costumes to wear to school.

I tried to negotiate a visit to all of the grades, rather than just the grade 5 and 6 visits I had scheduled for the day. I figured It'd be a pretty easy negotiation that would go something like this:

Me - "I want to teach every period of the day next friday, taking over each of the grades for a period and giving each of their homeroom teachers a break."

My Coordinator - "You want to work your ass off and you're not making any more work for any of the teachers? Sold. Go for it. Job's a good one."

Unfortunately, I'd clearly underestimated the importance of this ruddy festival, and the best I got out of her between bouts of teeth sucking (a patented Japanese form of "well...I don't know...") was something along the lines of an "I'll ask the other teachers, but they're all pretty busy...and the grade 5s and 6s have an established curriculum, so we can't deviate from it for something like a Halloween lesson."

So I went to my other schools from Monday to Thursday, expecting little form the Elementary on Friday. I wore my cowboy outfit to the High School on Monday as a bit of a dry run since my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) at the High School is chill and is amenable to the bouts of English mayhem I try to create. The students at the High School are this wonderfully chill brand of kids. I mean, their English ain't so hot since their school isn't all that academic, but I swear the worst these kids could ever throw at me would be a half-hearted sneer. They seemed to rather enjoy my outfit.

For the Junior High School on Thursday, I dressed up like a matrix reject. Very shortly after I started at the Jr. High back in August, some of my third year students had told me that, if I slicked my hair back and wore my sunglasses, I would look like this character named Albert Wesker from the the Resident Evil/Biohazard series of survival horror games. Well, I say they told me that, but when you factor in their broken English and my rudimentary Nihongo, it was more like they were communicating by smoke signals, and I was responding in semaphore, but somewhere in the middle I got "Hair. All back. Uesuka!" from them. I googled the guy, and when I saw his picture I thought "well. That's easy."

Some black clothes and some bicycle gloves later, I had all the students who had played Biohazard thinking I was a cool dude, and all the rest of them thought I was some freak who liked the Terminator movies an awful lot. (In Japan, if you're a white male wearing sunglasses, and you're a bit brawnier than the standard Japanese build, everyone tells you that you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger) Either one was fine by me.

Then I headed to the Elementary this morning, expecting little of the day but planning for the worst. I figured that since I had offered to teach all the grades about Halloween I should at least be ready to do so if my coordinator had managed to swing it. Plus, I'd had previous experience with her telling me something might change, only to inform me that it had, infact changed ten to fifteen minutes before I needed to have a completely new lesson ready for a completely different class.

And today was no different. I rolled in this morning, and she informed me that I would be visiting all six grades today. Surprisingly, all of the homeroom teachers had happily agreed to let me take over each of their classes for a period, saving them the lesson planning and teaching time.

Imagine that.

So I was able to bring a bit of Halloween to all of the classes today, doing things like drawing paper pumpkins, teaching them to Trick or Treat, and showing them pictures of all my mad costumes over the years, and all the mad costumes my friends had donned. The following picture of Alex was a real hit with the kids. I don't think you can say you've lived properly until you've seen a first grader imitate that rocker face.

I also told a ghost story to the older grades. Despite having to tell it through a translator, the kids were genuinely freaked out, so I don't think it lost any of its creepiness. What's more, I got them going and they told some ghost stories of their own.

But, what made the whole day was the one particular class where, without any prompting from me, the teacher had helped the students to build makeshift costumes. When I showed up to their class, they were sitting orderly in their seats, and every last one of them was wearing a costume.

Shit, man.

When Halloween means as much to you as it does to me, and it seems you have to fight tooth and nail to convince some of your friends/coworkers that there's a unique joy in throwing on a costume, to show up in a classroom in a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween and to find every last one of your students wearing a costume that they made from scratch specifically for your 45-minute visit...

James Donald Jones captured it best when he said "well. That just makes me feel about ten feet tall."

Doors and Walls

Japanese houses are mazes of sliding walls.

There is something about the architectural aesthetic that appeals to me: sliding doors instead of hinged ones. No wasted space. The door slides in front of another or into a pocket in the wall. This style of construction was made popular in the south of the country, where (as William Ferguson touched on in Hitching Rides with Buddha) the oppressive summer heat necessitates the ability to lay one’s house fully open so that what little wind there is can blow right through. Despite the cooler summers making such features unnecessary in Hokkaido, these architectural hallmarks have nonetheless persisted in the north of Japan. With all the sliding doors in the apartments and houses here, you never really have to commit to having a wall or a door in a given place.

Despite how flexible a set up this would seem to be, there is still an undeniable finality to a sliding door/wall. A hinged door, even when locked, is always an exit or an entrance. You can bolt it with as many latches and chains as you like, but as long as the knob and the doorframe still exists, it is still a door. Were you to lock a prisoner in that room, the hinged door would live on as a small area of hope in the prisoner’s mind. Even if the knob never turns and that door never opens again, it will always represent that possibility.

When a wall slides shut, it can give the illusion of a room without escape. The madness of it is multiplied when the handle for the door is small or hidden. Someone unversed in this design could likely die in an unlocked room like this: pounding on the walls, but never thinking to try sliding one of the walls out of the way.

All this came on at my high school when I first noticed the large, almost blast-door-like sliding walls that exist at the threshold to each of the three floors. Those doors could be slid shut, and where there once was a whole floor, there would only be a wall. These hold particular significance in my high school as I know this is the last year it will accept a new class. Next year the ichi-nensei (grade 10) will transition to ni-nensei (grade 11), and the ichi-nensei will cease to exist. The school, which already has so many derelict classrooms, will have even fewer students. I can picture it starting to shut up on itself, sealing off wings and class rooms that have sat idle for so long as to collect thick layers of dust. I dread when they close up the third floor—the third floor that I only just discovered. It houses a computer lab and a library, but its most alluring feature is the stunning view it provides of the Furubira valley below the school’s hillside setting.

Strangely, this image of the various wings of the school closing up is far more final and moving than the idea that there won’t be a new ichi-nensei class next year. Perhaps it is because I can already see the eventual outcome demonstrated in the now-closed kindergarten, which is adjacent to the elementary school I visit. Where once there were colourful little rooms filled with colourful little furniture and atomically-powered little children, now there is only a steel wall with one of those maddeningly knobless Japanese doors at the centre of it.

The door is a punctuation mark at the end of the life of the kindergarten: an undeniable, unmovable period.

School Snippets

A number of people have been asking me how the whole teaching/school thing is going, and I realized I’ve mentioned very little about it on here. Mostly, that’s because I have only been visiting the schools for four days, and that doesn’t seem like enough experience to base any sweeping statements on. That being said, in those four days I have managed to happen upon some salient moments, so I can pass those on.

So, in chronological order…

Elementary / Shoogako

You haven’t properly lived until you’ve experienced the unmitigated wonder of a round little first grader in chef’s hat and apron serving lunch to you and his classmates—one concentrated ladleful at a time.

High School / Koko

One of the girls in my third-year class looks familiar, and, to make matters worse, she keeps looking at me and laughing behind her hand. Eventually, question and answer period roles around, and—through my JTE’s translation—she asks me if I remembered her from the Kombini in town—the ONLY Kombini in town.

And the only thing going through my mind is “oh crap. Did I buy beer from one of my students?”

Middle School / Chyugako (blogger ate the formatting, and I'm too lazy to try to fix it, so I apologize)

Junior High School kids
Playing badminton
with the ferocity of Tennis Pros.

Me, I thought it was a good idea to play with them.

And

Just like when I agreed to join an Ultimate Frisbee team,

back before I’d ever properly played the game

and I still wondered why Overly Athletic Ally was so into it,

when, already tired from running the length of the field,

direction of play switched on me,

and I had to run all the way back.

Just like then,

I realize I have severely underestimated

the potential intensity of this game—

nay

—this Sport

And all I have to look forward to today
is having my ass handed to me

by a fourteen-year-old

girl.