Unlike in England, where we have stupidly decided to have our fireworks season when it is bloody cold and miserable in November, here in Japan (and pretty much every other sensible country), summer is the season for sitting out with friends, and getting pissed under the fireworks. Yesterday was the big display along the banks of the Edo River, one of the biggest in Japan. To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed by the actual display, the firework hearts were nice, as were the Doraemon faces, but I reckon Ravenscourt Park's Guy Fawkes night display was better. The evening though was very nice. There was a really nice breeze along the river so it was nice and cool, unlike the sweaty evenings recently, and despite there being 1.3 million people there, I managed to get to the Portaloos quickly and easily, which is, afterall, the most important thing. Here are some photos from the night - all the photos I took of the fireworks were crap. Very annoyingly.
Tag Archive for '千葉県'
Today, I went to my school for the last time, to collect the last of my things from my desk, and to check the progress of the speech contest students as they start trying to learn their speeches. I also wanted to take a photo of the Emotion beauty salon on the main street on the way to my school. It's a pretty average beauty salon, mainly used by local, well-off housewives and students at graduation and other important occasions. Walking past this place on the way to work every day for the past year, I have always wondered about the decision making progress that could have lead to the following being chosen as one of the photos used to illustrate the talents of the artists within. Maybe the area is, unbeknownst to me, big with circus performers...incidentally, the other two photos chosen seem to be of continental European lesbians circa 1990, and it gives me great pleasure to know that somewhere in the hinterlands of suburban Chiba, there is a sect of militant Prussian lesbians, shunning the modern world, whose only contact with the rest of us is when forced to work as clowns to earn money to make ends meet...it must be true. Emotion is the proof.
I can't remember quite what I said to my Vice-Principal when he asked me if I was a fast runner, but whatever it was, it can't have been sufficient to persuade him of my complete sporting ineptitude, because when Sports Day rolled around again, my name was in the roster for the teachers and PTA team in the 100m relay.
I enjoyed our Sports Day for once this year. The sun was out, the kids were well behved and the parents were friendly and in good voice. In short, it was a little like something from the Stepford Wives. I did make a massive mistake with my photos though. My camera has a thing on the viewfinder where you can adjust the focus for people with bad eyesight. The problem is, that if you have good eyesight (which I now do with my new specs on), it throws the focusing off completely. I realised at lunchtime, that the tiny dial for this was not quite centred and at f2.2 and above, it meant that about 100 shots were slightly out of focus. Really, really annoying. Oh well, you live and learn and all that.
There was a new (to me) event this year, which, like with so many of the events at a Japanese school sports day, would never, ever be allowed to be done in England for reasons of health and safety, mores the pity. This event, the name of which I forget, involved two teams, each of which had a giant ear-cleaning-bud thing to protect, which they surrounded, so that one end poked out of the centre of a circle of about 20 students. The other team then had to jump onto/through/above these kids and try to grab the ear-cleaning-bud thing and pull it to the ground, (thus also crushing the students around it). It was brilliant. The kids just leapt at eachother, knees into faces and arses on heads. Hilarious. It really should be a part of every school's violence repertoire.
By the time the teachers vs students race came around, it was about 3 in the afternoon and I was knackered after having been responsible for all photo teams and video teams all day. This did mean that my usual lack of speed would be excused somewhat by exhaustion, which was good, although I had a rather nasty feeling that some of the other teachers were actually entertaining the patently insane idea that we might beat the students team, comprising of the fastest kids aged between 12 and 15. It was never, ever going to happen. I ran after the Principal and Vice-Principal, which was basically perfect, as it meant that by the time I got the baton, we were already far too far behind the kids to have any chance of victory. My run was ok-ish, although I had the very peculiar feeling of my feet not quite connecting with the ground, like I was running a few centimeters above it. I have always rather suspected my ability to walk on air and this was a little like confirmation. I also think that my baton exchange with the teacher after me was really rather fine.
It's also interesting that since sports day, my students have all suddenly exhibited a new-found proficiency with English adverbial sentence construction and have seemed desperate to practice it with me:
Student: Hey Olly, nice racing.
Me: Why thank you, young Master Watanabe.
Student: Olly?
Me: Yes?
Student: You run very slowly.
Click for more pictures or click the link for the whole lot.
On the third stair down from the platform at the station yesterday morning, there was a squid. The squid was dead. It had two arms reaching onto the second stair from the top, but the majority of it's body was firmly on the third stair. The other passengers walked past it without really noticing it, or at least, without really paying it any attention. I couldn't believe it! This was a mystery indeed. After extensive research, I have come to the following conclusions: I believe that there are three possible likely reasons for the squid to have been found like this:
- The squid was being carried to a fish restaurant in the station arcade area, and managed to flop out of the box it was being carried in onto the top of the stairs before its need for liquid overcame it. In this light the achievement is quite extraordinary and the squid should be praised for its remarkable, valiant effort.
- The squid was sucked into the air, out at sea by a freak water-based tornado and then unceremoniously dumped onto the ground at the station when the tornado suddenly blew itself out. I don't think that this is a particularly likely reason due to the scarcity of tornados in the area in recent weeks, although if indeed it is the real reason, the squid must be comiserated for its sheer bad luck.
- The squid, a prisoner-of-war at a Octopus internment camp, managed to escape with many of his fellow prisoners-of-war in an intended 250 prisoner-break, and having briefly studied Octopusese, had managed to fool the guards on an Octopus train into believing that he was an Octopus, only to fall prey to the oldest-trick-in-the-book and answers in Squidish when the cunning Octopus officer wishes him luck and then flees only to be gunned down when he reaches between the second and third steps of the station, so nearly out of reach of the Octopi guns, where he is discovered the next day by me. This is clearly the most likely explanation, especially with the infamous Octopi/Squid war that has been raging around us for years now. We can only pray that his sacrifice will inspire other Squid in the years to come.
One of my favourite times of the day is the moment when my morning train ascends from the tunnels under Tokyo and, on a good day, is flooded with sunshine as the train climbs above the roofs of the city's hinterland. The gray concrete slabs of housing estates, box & packing factories, and suburban schools are turned peach pink by the low, early winter sun.
The residents of the 6.52 from Mitaka consist of the usual morning's quarry. At the other end of the bench from me, a couple of kids, who probably met for the first time the night before, lean symbiotically on eachother, sleeping with serious faces. The boy's laces have become entwined with some of the straps on the girl's handbag. The train crosses a bridge. The Pacific is almost visible through the mist of diffused exhaust fumes.
A woman at the end of the carriage is awakened by the enka theme of her phone. She commences a conversation that is slightly too loud for the sanctity of the carriage. She seems confused by the person at the other end of the line. She speaks only in aggressive, bewildered questions. Other passengers look at her, worried that they may have to interact with her in some way. To their relief, she gets off at the next stop, finishing her call as she walks, determined towards her exit. The train goes over another river. The world's most unappealing hotel floats past, sharing a small island with a large industrial plant.
At the top of the carriage, a woman stands, apparently unaware of the embarrassment of free seats around her. She is wearing a black suit and looks effortlessly elegant, bordering on cruel. It is as if she has been mistakenly plucked from a street in Ginza, and as yet has not deigned to notice. She uses her phone and nothing can be heard. The train pulls into Myoden station. Terminal.
The doors open. People begin to get off. The man opposite sleeps on. He has a child-like look of contentment, in his dream the soundtrack should be Louis Armstrong. He is wearing a suit and has clearly slept past his stop. He should never have left the tunnels. There is a slight stain of some kind of condiment on his collar. The man from the Metro jumps onto the train to check for stragglers. He shakes the man's shoulder. "Wake up, wake up, sir", he says, much more softly than I had expected. The man's face changes as he gradually comprehends. It is like watching someone go from the hope of early childhood to the worry of middle age in a couple of seconds. Sorrow touches his face for just a moment before it is replaced by the panic of his situation as he jumps and stumbles from the train in a vain attempt to reach the train now stopping at the opposite platform, to make his way back to the office in time.
Another day starts in Tokyo.
The city in which I do my daily penance, Ichikawa, is twinned with the city of Rosenheim in Bavaria, Germany (birthplace of Hermann Goering according to Wikipedia...hmm). Every year, the Junior High Schools of Ichikawa and Rosenheim take part in a school exchange project, a cultural exchange where a few Japanese students are introduced to the world outside their city and a few German students are thrust into the world inside Japan. It still confuses me a little as to whether there is an academic purpose of the trip, at least any deeper than allowing students to have a look at schools/societies on the other side of the world (which even alone is, of course, a valuable opportunity). The Japanese schools at least, seem to treat the trip as an English learning opportunity for the Japanese students, which is a little strange, seeing as the German students, while aeons ahead of their Japanese counterparts, are still not native English speakers.
The Japanese students all went over to Rosenheim in the summer. There seems to be no real theory at work in choosing which students will go over to Germany. I don't know who went from this school, but at my old school, the girl who went certainly wasn't the best at English, and she didn't even really want to go. I honestly think that the decision is probably made in a room, deep within the bowels of city hall, where the luminaries of the Ichikawa Board of Education sit around a fire, chanting arcane incantations and pulling bones out of a cauldron; bones on which the heat of the fire has scorched the names of the students that shall go.
Most of the Japanese students end up coming back from Germany with a new look in their eyes. They begin to scorn the behavior of their (male) peers that now seems so pathetically immature, and generally apply themselves to their studies with much greater dedication, especially so in English. I imagine that they all then go to decent high schools and universities and then to high paid jobs overseas, forever grateful to whatever fates it was that plucked them from academic obscurity.
The German students have a different experience awaiting them when they get to Japan. By the time they are probably preparing to come to Japan, it usually happens that one or more of the Japanese families that are supposed to be welcoming them into their homes will, now facing the imminent arrival of a foreigner (can you imagine?) into their very homes (where their children sleep, no less!!), have pulled out of the exchange and run away to he hills, screaming in terror and fearrrrrr. This means that the teachers of the school here will have to try to find another host family for the student, which is no easy task. They often ask among the teachers for a suitable candidate, and eventually can be heard suggesting (seriously) that the best idea for the Japanese/German cultural exchange would be that the ALTs (all of whom are English/American/Australian/Canadian etc.), should take the German students in. Bloody ridiculous. Eventually though, a kind family can be unearthed and the student arrives at the school.
The poor girls who arrived in the city schools today, were immediately thrust into classes to run the gamet of Japanese school subjects - Maths, Japanese, English, Revised-History (where, to their surprise, they find out that they had been the good-guys in WW2), and so on. All the classes are conducted in Japanese and they have no idea what the hell is going on. Sooner or later, they are introduced to the ALTs (me! - the lucky, lucky girl), and they can finally speak to someone who can understand English. The girl at my school (a very sweet 14 year old who towers above the 14 year olds here and speaks excellent English), had a lot of questions. As there had been no official welcome from anyone at the school, she hadn't been told what she was meant to be doing all day, nor if anything was expected of her and was very confused. She was also confused as to why none of the English teachers could speak English! This particularly amused me, as it's what I've been saying for years. The Japanese kids were all desperate to speak to her and in their excitement had forgotton the miniscule amount of English they had once almost known. Their questions to her were coming thick and fast now that I was around to translate: "What like food are you?!" WHAT LIKE FOOD ARE YOU?!!" "HOW STUDENTS DO HAVE??!" "What boy? WHAT BBOOYY?" and she was just about managing to roll with the punches.
It was then that she turned to me, and, in a devastatingly calm voice through the sea of screaming students engulfing her, asked me question was pertinent on so many levels: "Why are you here?"
Realising that I didn't know, I was suddenly lost for words. I could have cried.
