William Matheson's Journal

52. Well...

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:29:36 GMT

You know, I think I can deal. I got through today fairly well. There are a lot of pressures, especially in managing time, but I’m learning bit by bit. A few times today I had to decide to stop fretting and actually do something, and these times were all largely successful. The only problem I had today was that I ate too much at lunchtime (I bought the cafeteria special for 500 yen, which included a whole heap of rice – next time I’ll do what the other foreign teachers have been doing and forego the rice), and that made the afternoon a struggle just to stay awake, much less alert. But I made it.

Someone’s quitting, by the way. Not from the primary school, but still. I can see why he has to. He wants to teach; he doesn’t want to ride on the bus with four-year-olds for three hours a day, eat lunch with them, make a curriculum for them himself… It’s understandable. The only thing is, some of us primary school teachers may have to pitch in to cover his classes. In private schools, there are no government substitutes waiting to swoop in – if someone quits or is fired or gets sick, everyone else has to fill in the void.

Now, I’m not criticizing him for this – not at all. He’s going to a job at a Canadian-owner-operated eikaiwa in Ehime. If anything, I’m envious. I’m criticizing the system, but I see why things have to be the way they are. They can’t re-hire foreign teachers on a dime; for instance, it takes three months to get a Certificate of Eligibility. Of course, not having a COE didn’t stop two recent interns other than myself from coming over on tourist visas initially – they might as well just stop applying for them altogether and just stick to getting people visas after they arrive, which is a much faster (though grey) process.

When I quit my job at TeleTech, it was no big deal. I didn’t feel like there were repercussions echoing through the workplace. Of course, they were having Career Fairs every other Tuesday. Here, if I were to quit – and I won’t, because I would be letting myself and a whole lot of others down by doing so – besides which there are enough things to look forward to to keep it interesting) – but if I were to quit, I’d be really screwing over a lot of people. The impact would be immense and immediate. You know how three weeks notice is considered appropriate in typical North American situations? In this situation, you’d need more like three months.

[Woah. Lightning storm; and it might get bright and loud in a hurry.]

Yet apparently it’s common for people to jump from job to job here, although they’re usually working for eikaiwas, not for proper full-fledged schools (ALTs aside). People often get hired with a large outfit, quit as soon as they arrive, then migrate to a smaller one. Where’s the honour? (It’s as dead as the Empire.)

I sometimes think teaching in an eikaiwa would be nice, and in a good one, it could be great. But there are eikaiwas and there are eikaiwas. K. has a friend in an eikaiwa who has a two-year-old student. How that can be anything but glorified babysitting is a mystery to us.

The sheer audacity of putting any two-year-old except the most brilliant two-year-old on the planet into the hands of an English teacher astonishes me. For me, it reflects a general “oooh, wow, trendy, I want that” attitude towards English that completely disgusts me. If you come here, you’ll see English all over the place – but only a small (significant, but small) minority actually understands much of it. It’s just around because it’s trendy. OK, I guess that alone is fine, given that we use French loans and expressions all the time to add that bit of je ne sais quoi to our speech, mais dans cette circumstance there’s a whole economy based around this inane, deep-as-a-puddle flirtation with the language. I feel like a lot of people here don’t know what learning another language means or entails. (Many do! Many do! – let that not be forgotten.) They’ll put themselves or their kids into language training or perhaps even into our school without the will to make the sacrifices and adopt the learning and engagement processes necessary to thrive in a second language. It’s not so much that languages are hard – they just require focus.

Like, why do I have to be explaining that “where” and “doko” are roughly equivalent – to third graders?! This is stuff you should be doing in your first week of intensive immersion study of virtually any language. If I have to resort to my less-than-neophytic Japanese to explain things, I think there’s a serious problem.

And then there’re the classes that are the pedagogical equivalent of playing Whack-A-Mole. I had the Year Ones making introductory cards today in Life class; it’s the task I was assigned back in the first week of April, and this is only my second class with them due to schedule changes since then. So we’re making the cards, and the kids are lining up to vet every single little thing with me, which gets old really quickly. One girl I remember talking to at least four times – she wrote “I like ball” – she’d come up, and I would say, “You don’t just like one ball, you like [I stretch out my arms] all balls!” I even underlined the ‘s’ where I’d written ‘balls’ on the board after her first visit, when she had written ‘boll.’ Thank goodness I’m only scheduled for Life once a week – I couldn’t handle any more, and I was exhausted after today. The kids wouldn’t even let me leave after the bell rang – they kept getting in line and getting in line and getting in line and getting in line and I started to say, “Can I go now?” but it took H-sensei to come in and tell them in Japanese that class was over and it was now cleaning time. Anyway, next time I won’t hesitate to put my foot down and say class is over. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but I shouldn’t be such a wimp about things like that.

To close, it’s among my dearest wishes that individuals and institutions – my employers emphatically included – would get serious about language learning. None of this fluffy stuff – let’s get down to business already. Just being exposed to the language isn’t really learning, and Japan is probably the best case study that exists to make this point.

I’m going to stop this here, because this is kind of like complaining about the weather in terms of its futility. I’ll just have to pick my battles from here on out. But I know one thing – my year is going to be able to conjugate and properly use “to be” in their sleep.

51. Monday

Mon, 12 May 2008 14:36:52 GMT

Right now I’m watching close-ups of songbirds on NHK Tokushima – the images are so close-in that you can see their throat / beak movements as they sing. It’s over now. It was beautiful. It makes me feel better, after another ridiculous Monday. I didn’t get back here until eight o’clock.

I keep expecting that a Monday will just be a normal day, or even an easy day, in part because I only have two morning classes and therefore I have all kinds of time to get caught up on things. But you know what? Today was a Monday, a full-blooded Monday.

I turned the TV on to get the weather forecast. It doesn’t look too bad for Friday - partly cloudy, 20% pop. Provided that it doesn’t rain (and that the day isn’t forecast for it), we’ll be going on a day-long field trip up to Kagawa Prefecture, where we’ll visit a science-themed park. This will be a welcome excursion – I think it’s about high time we all do something fun together. The last time we got to have officially-sanctioned fun at work was the Year Six farewell party back in March. Speaking of which, this year’s Year Sixes are in Hawaii right now. Now that’s a school trip.

So help me, I miss W-sensei, who went to Hawaii with O-sensei and the Year Sixes. By her very presence, she has a way of keeping a lid on things. Some of the other teachers <ahem> may flex their muscles in her absence, and it isn’t always pretty – but that’s understandable because few have the experience that W-sensei does. The foolish things I have done and said (today alone) could fill a book. And I’m remembering now what I said this morning about thanking my lucky stars that I have such a patient and… well, patient… patient, understanding, and considerate cooperating teacher.

Speaking of considerate… I was really flustered this evening because I was behind on correcting tests which I had been putting off until I had spare 8-5 worktime to correct them, but I’d just then accepted (with a grudge the size of Mt. Fuji) the fact that that time was never going to come. Later I’d find out that our paperwork has been unilaterally quadrupled – I suppose it’s for a good reason, because the office claims that they don’t know what we English-medium teachers actually do. Anyway, I’m making it clear to anyone who’ll listen (which means I ought to shut up) that I’m not taking time away from other things I have to do to file supplemental reports. The intersessions, when all we have scheduled is day care, will be my primary time to do those. I keep my own records anyway, so it’ll just be a matter of transferring them.

One teacher said to me, “Well, wait, what about all that writing you do in your apartment in the evenings? What’s the difference?” I stared at her and felt like banging my head against the wall. But it’s a natural thing to assume; she thinks I write because I like writing. I might sometimes like writing, and I might sometimes like brain surgery, but that’s not why I do either. I write because it’s the only way I can express certain things. It’s not some hobby or pastime; it serves a need. And being needed to write more isn’t really a cause for celebration as I see it. Moreover, I have writing standards to uphold. I don’t churn out thoughtless crap. I care about my usage and my spelling and I spare a thought for grammar even if it’s to decide to break with convention (“rules” might sometimes be too strong a word). This all means writing takes a heck of a lot of time (as anything does when done right!), and that’s why I’m not exactly dancing around the Maypole with joy now that we have all these new monsters under the bed to feed.

And earlier I’d been frustrated because of the after school study sessions. Here’s what happened in a nutshell: Last academic year, a former intern was looking for something to do (understandable because he was quick about his work; much quicker than I usually am, anyway), and he saw (as anyone would) that the students needed extra support in English. So he started these after school extra help sessions. Great, right?

Well, the problem is this: he’s gone, and the program now is an over-formalized, taken-way-too-seriously, broadly-scheduled nightmare. What started as something one intern wanted to do out of kindness has become a weighty, onerous obligation. And the Japanese teachers love to obsess about when the sessions are, who’s teaching them, who’s specially… registered? We had to write lists of names that we thought could benefit from the special study (OK, fine), then these children had notes to their parents sent home with them (and God Only Knows what those notes say, because they’re in Japanese)…

It came down to today, and the schedule hadn’t yet been prepared. The timing was more or less forced on us; we were told that we were going to be starting it this week and sure enough at 4:10pm today there were 15 Year One children waiting in their classroom for a teacher to show up. So we sent in F., who’s their homeroom teacher anyway, and then got the rest of the schedule figured out.

Like, what was wrong with just offering extra help to anyone who wanted to show up? Quite frankly, we are not being paid nearly enough to be doing obligatory extra-curricular work on such a regular basis. The local hires, who teach a paltry few more classes a week but have equivalent responsibilities, make about twice what we “interns” make, and they’re underpaid by most standards. It’s exploitation. I feel exploited. And working to rule won’t work – it’ll just hurt me. Today D. remarked that he was surprised that I’d stayed past 5 after my earlier two-dimensional diatribes about working to rule since we were so poorly paid. But working to rule just sours everything for everyone – especially me, ironically.

Things will be better during the summer, to which I’m already on countdown – but of course there is “summer study” as well. But there’s also day care and a week-long holiday that everybody gets, and I think we’ll get 90-minute lunches during that period again… yeah, I guess I can survive this until then.

But there was also talk at the end of last term of beginning rehearsals for the speech contest right after summer vacation. And that’s my personal nightmare – it’s a real drag to have to work on a one-page, two-minute speech for an hour, four times a week. I really hope that after school will be throttled back like it was at the start of this year – but they put it back in after we sent in the rehearsal tapes (OK, cool) and didn’t take it away again (argh, ouch) when a bunch of our kids passed the first stage (which I admit didn’t happen at all the previous year – that year, all the children failed), which left F. having to do all of the sessions for weeks on end. That was ridiculous, and I’m going to make sure that it doesn’t happen again – one way or the other. (If it happens to me personally, I’m putting a travel agent on speed dial.)

Breathe.

I think most of this boils down to breakdowns in communication – I’ve been getting the sense that the office genuinely wants things to improve, although I dread the possible impacts of the sudden changes they may impose at any time. I now know why professional teachers work in labour unions.

In any case, for the most part I work with reasonable people, who are reasonable most of the time. I sure can’t honestly say any more for myself. I just think that people shouldn’t have to go into the back room and scream into pillows on a regular basis – I just don’t think that’s a part of any job. And I’m not even talking about me.

ANYWAY, what I was starting to say eleven paragraphs ago is that I work with some very fine people: In the midst of all of these frustrations, sometime past 6:30pm, I was correcting tests. I had a dictionary standing up behind my teacher’s manual for that course, and… something leaned. The manual fell against my Université Sainte-Anne water bottle, the bottle fell against my cup of coffee, and the coffee spilled over the desk, not enough of it onto the floor.

This made for some very grim moments as I was snatching tissues from my box and trying to soak up the worst parts of the mess. But even when I was grumbling and making use of a choice Polish curse word, E-sensei came and started helping me clean up. Few would have wanted to be within ten kilometres of me after school today, and yet here was E-sensei helping me clean up my awful mess. I won’t soon forget that. Maybe it’s something anyone would do, but there’s a difference between ‘would do’ and ‘she did,’ and I’m very happy that she did.

Well, time to get my seven hours of sleep…

I predict...

Mon, 05 May 2008 12:46:14 GMT

Penguins beat the Flyers (6)
Wings beat the Stars (5)
Wings beat the Penguins (4, maybe 5)

Thoughts?

50. Temple Try

Mon, 05 May 2008 09:47:43 GMT

After the hockey game (I’m probably watching too many of them), I made the trip back to Naruto for Temple 1.

It was a pretty spot, and worth seeing. I think, though, that I might have purchased the wrong book because I wasn’t able to get it stamped or written in at all, which is part of the point of going, at least for me. I’ll have to ask D. about this when he gets back from Tokyo. Other than that, it was a good little trip, although I only got to one temple and didn’t get any official validation even of that. I’ll try again some other weekend.

50 entries... this calls for a beer.

49. Naruto

Sun, 04 May 2008 15:43:51 GMT

I’m scorching hot. It must be over twenty degrees outside, and it’s almost ten o’clock. Nothing cools off here.

I woke up quite late today because I’d tried to watch the race earlier in the morning. Still, I somehow made myself do a load of laundry, shower, and get out the door.

I left the apartments at ten minutes to three, which was a lot later than I had wanted to leave, but I felt that I might as well go for it anyway.

I saw O-sensei, also biking, on the road in Kitajima, and he asked me if I was out shopping.

“No, I’m going to Naruto!”

“Naruto?!”

“Yes, to see the whirlpools!”

He could scarcely believe it. I told him that I’d biked to Anan and back before, so this would probably be okay. Still, this time I was on a time crunch – I needed to be at the whirlpools at 5:20pm.

I went through Matsushige and reached Naruto without incident. Naruto! It’s a lovely city. I really liked the lay of the streets there. But then the city gave way to dramatic scenery and fascinating infrastructure. I was really only halfway to my destination.

I crossed a bridge just north of the city that ran parallel to the expressway bridge. I figured since it was a regular road bridge and the only way to get across that I could see, it would have a bike lane or sidewalk or something. Ha-ha. I walked across the bridge on the elevated base of the railing, pulling my bicycle along on the road below me, the pedal facing me in its high position so I could get it as close to me as possible while trucks whizzed past me.

But this vexing crossing was worth it – the little hilly island on the other side was simply breathtaking. And the road I was on tunnelled under a ridge, but fortunately a pedestrian-bike tunnel had been built nearby as an afterthought. And on the other side I found lots of hotels, and eventually a gorgeous beachfront.

And off – way off – in the distance, I could see the Onaruto Bridge.

I snaked my way towards it through Naruto Park, which meant walking my bike up steep hills underneath giant expressway viaducts. Inside the park, I noticed that I was the only person with a bicycle – everyone else had driven a private car or taken one of the many, many busses. I had thought getting a bus would be a hassle, but if I saw correctly today there’s actually a direct bus from Tokushima Station – silly me.

I got to the portion of the park with the bridge promenade just before 5:00 – perfect! I parked my bike between the back side of a map stand and a guardrail where no one would run into it or care about it.

The bridge promenade was really cool. I mean that in both ways; most of it was open to the air, probably for structural reasons. Some of the Japanese there were visibly cold.

The whirlpools themselves were so-so – I saw a few baby ones, but I don’t think I got any really good photos of whirlpools. The walkway was actually the real hit with me. It would have been kind of cool if it kept going and people could walk to Awaji Island. There were service corridors that could theoretically facilitate this and as these sorts of things ought to be they were locked.

At length, I left the park, but not before gawking at the huge lineup of tourists waiting to get back on a bus. I was happy to have my good old mamachari. (Here’s one that puts the “mama” back in the name.) I happily coasted down the windy access road and out of that part of the park.

I decided to leave by the road heading west, as I didn’t want to go over that crazy bridge again. But before I knew it, I was walking my bike uphill. I went on to spend almost two hours on hilly island roads as darkness set in. But I really enjoyed these hours. (Although I was a bit disappointed to find all the vending machine Gatorade at the highest point was sold out – in fact, almost everything up there in the middle of nowhere was sold out.) And the descent from the highest point? Whee. I was going so fast I might as well have been driving a car.

After dark, I got out of the hills by taking a convenient narrow access road that twisted and turned its way back down to sea level. (Good thing I had my maps.) At the bottom, I suddenly found myself in a picturesque Japanese fishing town. The road I was looking for hugged the shore, and sometimes it was one lane and sometimes two, and the town was built on it. It was a really, really long one, too – I mean, both the town and the road were quite elongated. It’d be an interesting drive to work in central Naruto.

And that’s where I ended up myself, at great length. Oh, but I saw that another bridge not far from my first bridge did have ample pedestrian / bicycle access – of course, I wouldn’t have really thought to have tried it before, even though I knew it was there. I was glad I didn’t take it in the end, because I would have missed the fun pedestrian tunnel, the crazy fun little mountains, and the cute fishing town.

I ate at a CoCoICHI in Matsushige, left there at nine and got home just before ten o’clock. What. a. day. And tomorrow I’m going to do it all over again – it’s time to check out the first five or so temples on the 88. Seeing all the temples in Tokushima Prefecture seems like a worthwhile summer-spanning diversion. I can probably reach all but two or three of them by bicycle. And like today, I’ll be certain to find surprise and adventure.

Until then!

Eight Belles

Sun, 04 May 2008 13:24:07 GMT

Last night I was up really late chatting with a friend, and between that and reading stories and uploading photos it was five in the morning before I knew it. So I figured, what the heck – might as well stay up and watch the Kentucky Derby.

So I tried, I really tried to stay focused – I read my increasingly creased Stories of English book during the boring bits (why do they need to interview so many B-list celebrities?).

I was really fighting drowsiness, though. Ah, but then the jockeys were called to the post. OK, cool! But I still kept getting into these microsleeps. OK, OK, focus.

And the next thing I know, it’s 7:30 and the announcer is saying “… triumph and tragedy at the Derby…” and I’d missed the most exciting two minutes in sports – Big Brown won from the 20th gate, edging out Eight Belles, the filly I was rooting for, who broke both of her ankles during the post-race cool down and had to be euthanized on the track.

Maybe it’s just as well I missed seeing that.

On top of it all, I felt like I kind of wasted my time, because I could have slept through the morning and seen the same amount of the race (nothing).

I’m only really mentioning this because it was so sad – I had only a vague idea that horse racing could be so brutal. I’m not a fan by any means; the Derby just happens to be an important sports event in general, kind of like how if people only watch one golf tournament a year, it’ll be the Masters. It's the … just the humanity … the pathos? of waking up to hear what I heard, it all sat in my head for quite a while, even after I woke up later that morning.

Ubuntu 8.04

Sun, 04 May 2008 05:02:19 GMT

While you're waiting for XP SP3...

I'm posting from my first truly successful installation of Ubuntu on my computer.

Is it ready to be a mainstream desktop replacement? (And, on that note, are we looking for a problem to go with this solution?) Well, allllllmost.

It's definitely ready to be an alternate desktop for those of you who are even the least bit technical. (HAHA WHAT A PUN OMG I'LL BE HERE ALL WEEK)

The prime reason to make the move to evaluating Ubuntu now is that you can install it on top of Windows. Seriously. No repartitioning your hard drive or any of that stuff. I partitioned my hard drive myself when I first got this machine, and it would have gone better if I'd known what I was doing - I tried to install Ubuntu back then, but I didn't have my machine partitioned properly.

Now a good old NTFS (or maybe even FAT / FAT32?) Windows partition is all you need (if you're running Windows, you have this) and 5GB (low end) to 30GB (phat, I settled for 15) of free space. Maybe defragment your target drive first; you don't want this big file you're going to have to end up fragmented, right?

Download the Ubuntu ISO, burn it to a CD, and then load the CD within Windows and start the installation from there. This is really sexy; it's what a lot of people who weren't willing to tear apart their Windows installations were praying for.

The Ubuntu-on-Windows installation is so easy and painless it's almost unfair. You'll be up and running in under 20 minutes. It even makes the changes to your XP bootloader for you so that you can easily chose between XP and Ubuntu every time you boot up. XP remains the default, so if you just turn on your computer and walk away, when you come back you'll see your good old XP desktop (or login screen, as the case may be).

Ubuntu's good points:

- It's beautiful and functional.
- It seems like a great environment in which to get some work done.
- It's a clear improvement on previous releases. My wireless actually worked properly this time, even with a passkey having been set up.
- The package / installation manager is great (when it works). You won't like going back to Windows and downloading and executing .exe files; that's not nearly as sexy.
- It eats and breathes interoperability; your Mac-formatted iPod will work just fine with it - in fact, I had to run a LiveCD instance of Ubuntu the other day to copy some mp3s off a co-worker's Mac-formatted iPod. (Windows lacks native capability in this area and requires an expensive add-on.)

... and the not-so-great:

- Some key Windows titles are not available for Linux. I cite ACDSee, SlingPlayer (for my SlingBox), and Adobe Premiere. When I'm editing videos I can't live without the last item, and I can never live without the first two. Since I don't have a Intel Core Duo processor stepping with the feature that enables side-by-side operating system instances, greatly diminishing what I could get from virtualization, the virtualization solution wouldn't really work. I'll still need to use Windows more often than Linux.
- The features that let Ubuntu play with proprietary file types (MP3, Windows Media, etc..) aren't installed by default for copyright / royalty reasons. You have to install a package called "Ubuntu Restricted Extras." This is easy to do using the aforementioned package manager - heck, you can even update a LiveCD RAM-based "installation" this way if you're doing something like accessing a Mac-formatted iPod - but many new users won't realize this and will be wondering why they can't get their MP3s to play.
- My wireless finally worked, yes, but not without a few user-interface-related configuration hiccups. I guess I should be glad that I didn't have to "wrap" a Windows driver or anything uber-technical like that.
- I couldn't get my TV to act as a second monitor - at least not in a way that actually worked (I just saw fuzz on the TV screen). Amazingly, changing screen resolution on the fly is a recent feature - and some prior releases I played with didn't work at my native widescreen resolution, so everything looked kind of hazy. The interface for all this is still quite clunky compared to the Windows equivalent.

Still, don't let those, my personal quibbles with Ubuntu, stop you. Linux purists who have been here all along may not agree with me, or may be disgusted even if they do agree, but the ability to install a mainstream Linux distribution on a Windows drive may prove to be a key watershed moment. PCs are going to continue to be shipped with Windows pre-installed, which I think is actually a good thing because we still need Windows anyway. More to the point, Windows pre-installed on a machine costs little to the end user - rumour has it that it that these installations pay for themselves through sponsored add-ins. ("TRY AOL FREE," et al.) And nobody wants to repartition their harddrive, unless they have the luxury of owning a computer just to play with it. This all adds up to a recipe for adoption, if you ask me.

So yeah, have fun! Ubuntu's pack-in version of Solitaire includes a hint feature, if you were wondering.

48. Showa Day, Hesei Technology

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:54:03 GMT

I haven’t told this story to anyone yet. Part of that has stemmed from my persistent yearning to keep my facts straight. (And still sometimes I exaggerate. The steel wall behind the school was really more like 1.1 stories tall.) But the other reason had to do with the fact that this is a bit of an awkward, self-effacing story that requires a modicum of alcohol to bring oneself to tell, and that’s what my trip to Circle K ten minutes ago ended up facilitating.

We had a great time celebrating Showa Day (or, perhaps, Showa) with L. We had a great lunch at his new apartment. I bravely or foolishly sought to bring ice cream – it had been a while for me, and I felt that it had probably been a while for the others too, so I stuffed a well-wrapped 2L tub of Neapolitan deep in my backpack for the should-have-been-45-minutes-but-was-an-hour-because-people-kept-stopping-and-other-things-went-wrong bike trip. Remarkably, it was still frozen and semi-hard when we finally reached L’s. It was hot enough outside that I’m sure it wouldn’t have lasted 20 minutes had I not insulated it with my coat and a cold towel.

After lunch and some conversation, we got back on our bikes and headed for a huge beachfront park nestled on the south side the airport.

Even as I was starting to change into my shorts I felt a bit… well…

I guess chilli and ice cream aren’t a good combination for me.

Soon after leaving my stuff with everyone on the beach, I resolved to go back to the main building in search of a restroom. I found one. At first all I could find were Eastern toilets, and so it was with great relief that I spotted a more contemporary unit, and not a second too soon – I shudder to think what could have happened otherwise.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one in that restroom, and so I wanted to hit that flush button as soon as possible. But the control panel was unlike any other I’d seen before. Frantically pushing buttons, I ended up turning on the bidet. On both sides. Gah.

Then I tried a nice big button that was down and to the right of the panel – you know, maybe the panel was just for the electric toilet seat / bidet. So I pressed it.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

“*@&#!” I yelled. And I guess this time it was kind of literal.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I’d unwittingly triggered some sort of an alarm. The insistent, panicky beeps sounded throughout the building (judging from what I could hear). There wasn’t any way to stop it – and I still couldn’t flush; in my panic and delirium I simply activated the bidet again, but this time at a higher intensity. GAH!

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I heard footsteps and voices approaching. Okay, okay. Think. Think. I implored the wall and the control panel for an answer. I noticed a not-quite-representational diagram of the control box that indicated buttons on top. On top? Yes, there they were – two tiny little flush buttons, with the kanji for “big” and “small.” I forgot which was which, so I just hit both in succession.

Mercifully, eventually the beeping stopped, but then there was a knock at the stall door followed by a curt interrogation in Japanese.

Um… uh…

“ウン、どもすみません… わたしわだいじょうぶです。”
“Uh, domo sumimasen… watashi wa daijoubu des.”
[Terribly sorry. I'm okay.]

I heard something else.

“ウン… ちょとまてください。すみません。”
“Um… choto mate kudasai. Sumimasen.”
[Please wait a moment. Sorry.]

I guess eventually they went away. I was left shaking and trembling, but left in peace. Gah, holy ~~cra-~~ … um, I mean, wow, that was intense.

As I left the main building and walked light-headedly back to the group, I started to laugh inside. I mean, this whole thing seemed pretty funny. (“Wow, another great moment in my internship!” it could be phrased.) Everyone was all split up doing their own things when I got back, so I decided to save the anecdote for an appropriate time when everyone’s together and we happen to be on a related subject. That could be a while, but some anecdotes keep well.

[Update: I'm looking at my photos from the day, and the button was labelled "呼出" with a yellow kana sticker afterthought "よびだし" - yobidashi, which I've looked up and found to mean "call." D'oh. But the word also refers to the people who summon Sumo wrestlers to the ring.]

47. Sankanbi approaches

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:39:44 GMT

Work’s been getting busy lately, as teachers foreign and Japanese alike buzz about, filling their few spare moments with the frantic preparations necessary for Sankanbi – the meetings about Sankanbi, the assigning and gathering of student work for display on Sankanbi, and occasionally even preparations for the Sankanbi lessons themselves.

The parents who will be coming to see their children have high expectations – they want to hear their children speaking English, they want to see their children’s artwork and stories, and they want to see that the teachers have made flash cards the size of neighbourhood electric vehicles. Including finding out just how much our photocopier can enlarge, it’s been an educational experience for me so far.

Even the school building itself isn’t left out of the work – the entire east wing of the primary school, save the second-floor teacher’s office that we work out of, is closed for extensive renovations and, rumour has it, earthquake-proofing. When I say “closed,” I really do mean closed – the rest of the primary school is walled up! We now have to enter through the west wing and cross to the teacher’s office via the second-floor balcony. Behind the school where people go back and forth between the west wing and the junior high stands a giant 1.5-story steel fence evidently meant to keep all interlopers out of the construction staging area. It kind of gives the whole place a Cold-War-era-Berlin feel, and the teacher’s office is Checkpoint Charlie.

Tomorrow is Showa Day, a day honouring the birthday of the Showa Emperor (but just between you and me, we can call him Hirohito – but that’s just for us, OK?). It will probably remain a holiday indefinitely – Hirohito, posthumously named Showa, after his era (reigning Japanese emperors are never referred to by their given names by their Japanese subjects, and after they die they are referred to by their era names) was emperor through times of great changes (a great understatement). Let’s just say that we’re not likely to see a Heisei Day meant to memorialize the collapse of the tech bubble or mourn the ripple effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Anyway, so tomorrow we’ll get up early and catch the Habs game, then later we’ll be going up to Matsushige to visit L. at his new apartment. I’m kind of happy to have a holiday falling on a Tuesday like this – it helps break everything up a bit.

46. Mt. Bisan

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:44:50 GMT

What a gorgeous Sunday!

Today we had our first language class with J. (yes! that J.!), who had just gotten back from a vacation to New Zealand. (She loved it. And she says that, yes, there are a lot of sheep there.) I hadn’t realized that the kindly older lady who taught us the two previous weeks was a substitute.

At first I was a tiny bit apprehensive, but once we got going, things were great! J.’s an excellent teacher! She was authoritative but accessible, and firm yet funny. I didn’t look at my watch once, except at five minutes to the end after she checked the time herself and started to wrap things up.

So I’m pretty happy about where this is going, but we’ll definitely have to redouble our efforts on the alphabet. Up until recently, F. and I had been doing our lessons with L. with a book written in the medium of English that had the transliterations. Now we’re into a book written in Japanese, which means full-blown kana and kanji (but with kana superscript, of course). As far as that goes, I’m kind of OK with hiragana and kind of lost with katakana (I still have to look at the tables nearly every time, which makes things difficult because the Japanese aren’t exactly shy about adopting English loanwords for modern essential items) – as for the others, one’s really awesome in hiragana but knows no katakana, and the other knows little of either but remembers and uses vocabulary a lot more effectively than I do. In our linguistic journey of a thousand miles, we’ve each taken about a quarter-step, but it’s something. =)

After class, we had lunch at Lotteria, a burger joint under the station. The service was friendly, though the portions were small and condiments nonexistent – if you want ketchup with your fries, you’d better bring your own. My advice: stick with McDonald’s, or, in the bigger cities, go someplace really special. The cheeseburger at Lotteria was really tasty, but kind of small compared to what one might expect if one’s used to North American burger joints. Apparently they’ve been in a price war with McDonald’s – if so, McDonald’s is kicking their butts, as I’ve come to rely on McD’s 100 yen menu many times. Lotteria has a 100 yen hamburger; McD’s has 100 yen hamburgers, cheeseburgers, nuggets, drinks… you name it.

Later in the afternoon, F. arranged for us to meet a fellow we knew through Awa Connection who’d take us up Mt. Bisan. I didn’t know that I’d be doing this today, but it had been something I’d been wanting to do for a while, and today was a good day to do it. We picked a relatively easy trail (“D”) and started up.

The views and flora were amazing. The steps were endless. This was a climb, unlike any I’d experienced before - keep in mind I grew up on PEI, where the highest point (140m) is only about half as high as Mt. Bisan (290m). I also never "climbed" the PEI "peak." At any rate, our legs were quite weak by the time we reached the top.

While up there, we went for a beer in the little restaurant at the ropeway station that overlooks the city. Gee, it’d be a fun place at night, too. You could see for miles and miles from up there. And after that, we took a look at the cascading gardens. They’re gorgeous; as always, pictures pending.

And then we went down. I had thought this would be easy. It was only faster. If you’ve never hiked down a mountain before, you don’t know how hard it gets on your shin muscles to keep you upright and keep your decent somewhat controlled. I was very happy indeed to reach level ground.

At the bottom, we discovered we’d lost F., but I guessed that she took an unintended turn where the “C” and “D” trails merged, so I looked at my trail map and started biking towards the bottom of “C.” Sure enough, I met her on the street barely a minute after I left the rest of the group.

We went for coffee, and after that we went our separate ways. The day was a great opportunity to do something spontaneous and fun in good company. Taking it all in on aggregate, it’s advanced my internal dissertations on where I am and where I’m going (and why can I say “where I’m (at)” but not just “where I’m?”), and it’s mostly too self-indulgent to be blogging material. I’ve been trying more to listen and let go, both in class (a student-centred approach is vastly superior to a teacher-centered approach in nearly all cases) and in life (it helps other people foster their feelings of importance). Yes, I’m still as opinionated as ever, but I hope to be able to well inform half or more of my condensed, pithy outlooks. And I’m finding, both in class and in life, that there can be a lot of value in what I chose not to say.

Above all, I’m tremendously relieved to find that I will not feel the way I have recently for the rest of my time here. Like the transition from January to March, the transition from April to December or March will give me time to accumulate experience and make sense of a lot of things. It hasn’t been easy getting into this new school year (art is draining, and junior high math will be a challenge) but I’m starting to see that that just kind of goes with the territory – it’s not just me, which is what I was deathly afraid of, and that feeling made me gaze upon the calendar with a nervous eye.

I’m also throttling back on my concerns about my future. Any conclusions or decisions I’d come to make now would be inadequately informed. It’s best just to wait, and I’ve got lots of time.

45. Y-chan's Airplane / Masters

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:53:13 GMT

Seventh lesson was cancelled today because we had a special ceremony for one of our Year 5 students. Her drawing of a bird-like airplane won a prize in a JAL contest. Some representatives of the company came and spoke, and her drawing will be painted on one of JAL's upcoming 787s.

One of the Year 4s there asked me if I'd gotten a haircut - I said that I had, and added that I cut it myself. (I used the trimmer that I bought a little while ago. The results of my inexperienced and impatient handiwork were "short.") The student asked me why, and I told him it was because I couldn't afford a haircut - they're too expensive here. I quoted prices and made a gesture of clipping my own hair.

He looked at me quizzically and said, "You know, you are funny sometimes." He didn't mean the ha-ha kind.

* * *

Trevor Immelman has won the Masters. I got up at 4 this morning to catch some of it, but it was a rough go considering that we'd been partying all day Sunday.

Tiger was struggling with his putter, but he still managed a second-place finish. If it was any other golfer putting like he did, they probably wouldn't have even made the cut.

It'd be cool if a winner of the Par 3 Contest won the tournament. Then people wouldn't think it's "jinxed," and they might start trying to repeat the feat of winning both. I wonder who'll do it first, and when? We could be waiting a while...

44. Language Lesson / Rainy Party

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:30:53 GMT

The language lessons at TOPIA this morning were... interesting. =) The lady in charge? Let's just say that she was flustered, and the result was that she knew which side her bread was buttered on. She apologized after the classes were over, so no hard feelings - but it was really, really nuts when we first came in. Get in line, sit down, where's your paper with your name, did you register, etc.. etc..

Anyway, the lesson itself was very well done - we had a very kind, patient, humorous, and skilled teacher. No complaints there! She was okay with us not having the hiragana and katakana memorized backwards and forwards too; she even romanized a few things for us.

I held my own through the lesson; the people who were better than me were... you guessed it, Chinese. =) And, OH! Wow, there were so many cute Chinese girls there! I wonder if any of them speak a little English... =)

M., A., and I went to Ingrid's Hanami party at the park later on, and F. and D. joined us later. Wow. It was a great experience; all the beer you could drink for $10, yes, but it was more than that. The cherry blossoms had mostly blown off, the skies were gray and later rainy, and the weather was mild, and people were cheery - the whole expereince underlined the transitory nature of life. It was like carpe diem in a glass. M. and I climbed the castle mountain - he talked about some things, and I took a ton of pictures. It was a sublime experience all around.

I got to chat with a lot of new people at the party, and I hope to come out of it with a few friends in the long run. What's more, we all had a great time even though the rain started to pour as it got dark. That reminds me, I've got to put my things away and hang up my wet clothes. Riding slightly inebriated with an umbrella in the driving rain? Not the easiest thing in the world, not by a long shot.

This Sunday is different from all the others that have passed before, because I'm actually kind of looking forward to going back to work. I'm completely prepared for my classes, and I'm looking forward to all kinds of different little things. This is a great time to be here. Wow.

Slingbox working!

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:01:19 GMT

Guess who's watching Boston at Montreal right now, while he's cooking some eggs and getting ready for Japanese lessons.

ME.

Yes, the Slingbox is finally working! Well, the Slingbox always worked; it was the home network that was a pain. We had a very old Netgear router that we'd got for maybe $30 or $40 five years ago. Things like me watching the Slingbox from here, or even me uploading Flikr and Facebook photos from home would knock it out and require a power cycle. But Mom went and got us a new router last week, a Linksys WRT54G, and while it didn't configure itself and we did have to set up port forwarding on both the Slingbox and the router (and this was a pain, because I had remote control only over Mom's computer, and she only has Windows Me, and the SlingPlayer, which you need to configure the SlingBox, requires a modern NT-based Windows, like Windows 2000 or better), it's working now! And I have reason to expect it'll stay working, because the new router is a robust, tried-and-true unit.

Thanks go to our family friend K. for driving back and forth to and from our place so many times in order to get this working. I just sent him an e-mail, and it began with, "IT WORKS!!!!!"

My old Toronto friend Jolene was like, "Are you missing playoff hockey? If my computer was near my TV, I'd point my webcam at it and let you watch. No one deserves to be deprived of playoff hockey!" It was so sweet; I was touched. But now, finally, I can watch on my own and no longer rely on the time and work of others.

Well, time for breakfast!

42. Looking Ahead (Way Ahead)

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:14:35 GMT

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about when I will go home and what I will do when I go back. It’s vital to have a plan – the plan can be changed, but if you go home without a plan (as I did from Ukraine two years ago), you can quite easily end up working in a call centre. (“Thank you for calling Sprint, together with Nextel…”) I vaguely remember even applying to teach English in Japan with AEON, but I didn’t get past the teaching demonstration stage because I… well, sucked. I was crushed. In disbelief, I even asked why – looking at that, I know that even I wouldn’t have hired me. Their reply should have been predicted.

Well, maybe it was time to join the workaday world. But after I started at a workaday job – a call centre – I quickly realized that I had to get out. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of people still there doing great work. But for me, the environment was a little bit … toxic? Stifling? I felt more like a drone than a stakeholder? It wasn’t entirely my scene, if you follow me. So I started saving up every penny so that I could afford to go back to school and at least upgrade to the equivalent of a four-year honours degree, salvaging some respectability. And I did. (And I still got to go to PEI for August!) The vast amounts of reading and composition that go along with the study of English literature were a breeze – not so much that it was easy (but it sometimes was) or interesting (but it often was), but more because I had the thought of going back to the call centre to scare myself with.

Anyway, fast-forward a bit and here I am in Japan. Many things conspire to make this an important character-building experience: the independence, functioning as an adult, the job itself… The job itself hasn’t been a cakewalk. Sometimes I don’t like it, to be honest with you. It doesn’t pay particularly well, and there are a lot of responsibilities – not all of them are exciting, but all of them take a lot of time. But it’s been an invaluable education in language (both Japanese and English), working norms, time management, workplace relations… to write down every specific thing I’ve learned and experienced would take dozens of pages (and Miss Squires would get mad). The point is, $20,000 spent on a commerce degree at my alma mater wouldn’t necessarily get me the same kind of practical life experience that I’m getting here.

I’m also getting better at teaching, although I don’t want to teach as a career, for reasons that I can’t fully describe. There are three R’s to teaching: responsibility, resources, and rewards. There’s a heck of a lot of the first ‘r,’ and not enough of the other two, at least in my opinion. Of course, if you take “rewards” to include rewards outside of the strictly pecuniary ones, then you might have something. I mean, I love my students – they’re awesome. My co-workers are great, too. But I still don’t want to teach as a career. I’m just not ready for the prospect of cutting out flash cards and clip art and actually using Comic Sans MS (yuck!) beyond age 35.

Nevertheless, I can teach for now, and I’ve been getting more confident as I begin flirting with competence.

But how long should I keep doing this? I know this is a silly question to be asking after just three months, but it bears some thought, even though it’s arrogant to assume that I’ll be offered a contract extension or able to slip into another job easily.

Japan’s a fine country, but putting down roots here is out of the question – I’ve seen enough people who have, and I don’t want to become like them or be stuck in their situation, gilded cages though they may inhabit. Many people go on to marry and raise children here (sometimes the latter causes the former), and while that would work for some, it would be hard for me to pursue my educational and “career” goals in such a situation. The people who stay usually just teach in eikawas, or they’re ALTs. Who’d want to stay long-term in a foreign country where there is only one occupation available to you, when you could stay in your home country where potentially every occupation is available to you? (OK, a few people on working holiday visas sometimes work at bars or do other odd jobs – you can be some bar owner’s gaijin on a leash if that’s what you desire.)

There is another category of people – those that have significant skills in Japanese, those who perhaps hold advanced degrees or are skilled in a technical trade like software engineering. For them, it’s a different story. What I’m saying is that it could very well be impossible for a dilettante like me to morph into a skilled person while still living here. (And with a family? Forget it!) People like me end up working in eikawas, maybe also tutoring privately, and perhaps (in my case) wondering “What if?”

This won’t be me, because I’ll be going home eventually. I was going to speculate about when, but I’ve just now realized that it’s poor form to do so publicly. But I can tell you that I’ve already begun planning for the 2009-10 academic year and beyond. I’m going to start with (I say this with great embarrassment) Continuing Ed. Physics, Pre-calculus, and probably also French. From there I fully intend to get first-year university calculus, physics, and astronomy – all those things that I wished I could take but couldn’t, because I refused to spend money on non-credit courses. Well, no longer! I’m saving like a madman, and I’m going to spare no expense when I return in making myself into an educated person! I’m tired of reading xkcd and not having a clue (or a laugh)! I’m tired of reading about planets and stars and not understanding the jargon! I’m sick of not being able to try doing the things that I’ve always wanted to do because I was stuck on a humanities path! (And I wasn’t taking philosophy, which could have redeemed that somewhat.) I’m through allowing myself to keep paying for the crap I went through in high school! I’m sick and tired of just sailing mindlessly through life! It stops HERE!</rant>

* * *

There will be a total solar eclipse in 2009, which until recently I was planning to witness. The path of totality passes not far south of Kyushu.

But there’s a catch. The eclipse passes over small, sparsely (and in some cases, non-) populated islands. You won’t just be able to show up on the day. They’re talking about allowing only 1,300 people into the area, and imposing a 3-day minimum stay and a minimum charge of $3,000. There’ll be a drawing to determine successful applicants.

Geez, another 100km further north, and this eclipse would have been a no-brainer.

Yakushima is not nearly as hard to get to, but it’s on the north end of the path of totality – totality will be reduced from six minutes to two. It’d still be special, but not worth planning one’s teaching sojourn in Japan around considering that there will be other eclipses in the future that will be far, far easier to get to (notably the 2017 eclipse - I’m totally Greyhounding my way down to that) and probably with a lighter possibility of clouds. [Woah, there's even an eclipse that goes over West Prince in 2024!] If I’m still here, I’ll try my best to get to Yakushima, but I probably won’t still be here – physics starts in early July of that year, my cousin’s wedding is in May of that year, etc..

While we’re talking about unique astronomical phenomena, I’d really love to witness this. =)

43. Foul Ball

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:45:27 GMT

It’s a beautiful, sunny Saturday. Just now, I was on my balcony hanging out my laundry while a scrimmage or intersquad game was going on the ball diamond across the street. I was watching the action when an S.G. batter batted off a really high foul ball – it cleared the fence and netting (the netting is about four stories tall!) and hit the balcony rail of an apartment a floor down and a few over. From there it plopped into the open drain between the apartments and the street.

That ball almost landed snugly in that balcony. Another two inches higher would have done it. But I will probably never get such a souvenir – there’s overhead netting in the area around home plate, so a ball would have to have a pretty fancy arc and a wind to blow it backwards to get to me.

I might have been inclined to go and ~~steal~~ fetch the ball, but not with it being in the smelly, sewer-like drain – eww. Nevertheless, I quickly noticed two players apparently looking for it. They started looking too close to where I was, and so I (from the third floor), told them to go back a little more. They found it, and they thanked me. It was a sublime moment – one of those little ones that pleases you for a little while after the moment’s over. I mean, they would have found the ball without me, so it’s not that – it’s just a cool collection of happenings, I guess.

These foul tips may happen fairly frequently, or perhaps they feel that it would be littering to leave a bunch of balls lying around outside the ball diamond. I say this because the two players went back down the street to the far corner of the pitch and stayed there. They must be stationed there to keep an eye out for stray balls. Sometimes I feel that in Japan, they have to have people to do everything.

(#42 will be posted later today.)

41. First Day

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:25:01 GMT

Today we had the Opening Ceremony. The children came into the gym by class. The last school year only ended two weeks ago, but even so, my old Year Fours (now Year Fives) seemed to be three inches taller. "Yeah, we're in Year Five now," they seemed to say in their gait. They oozed confidence the whole day. I think they're in for a terrific year.

I'm getting along well with my new Year Threes. They're an energetic and talkative bunch, and sometimes they can be loud, but they have a redeeming, cheerful attitude.

The rest of the day was somewhat chaotic. In the afternoon they had us foreign teachers go out with the classes to help clean, in preparation for tomorrow's Entrance Ceremony to celebrate the new Year Ones. I suspect the cleaning is partly done to keep the kids busy - the "cleaning" jobs done by most children with their lone resource (perhaps a wet rag) isn't exactly Molly Maid-quality. The problem was that the directive to stay with them used up quite a lot of time that might have been better spent elsewhere. You'll see what I'm getting at - I saw Sk-sensei carrying a parking sign, and I remembered that we needed to dress up and put out the special event sign, but in the ensuing confusion the memory quickly slipped. It would have been perfectly acceptable to tell M-sensei that we foreign teachers needed time to get the sign ready, could we go do that, and that should have occurred to me.

At 5:00, I had everything ready for my classes tomorrow, and I headed home to enjoy a nice big bowl of rice and curry. I chilled out, checked my e-mail, started listening to Prime Time Sports, heated up my rice and curry and started to dig in... delicious! By now it's just after six.

Then there was a knock on my door.

It's D.

"We need to go back to work. We forgot to put up the school sign."

Few words could have been less welcome then than, "We need to go back to work." Oh, don't get me wrong, I assume my share of the responsibility for this, but that didn't make me any less cheesed. I just had to be careful not to direct it at D. - he was just the messenger. He was the senior teacher, so they phoned him first.

C. came back, too - his family was just about to have dinner! ("The Missus will kill me," he said even as he left.)

After I got my head on straight, being back at work wasn't so bad. And everyone there was really nice about it, too, and thanks were given even though they weren't strictly necessary. We finished the sign.

We didn't put the sign out yet, though. Early last academic year, S. and D. put the sign out the night before an event. The de facto head of the school, who lives across the street, looked out her window and noted that the sign wasn't colourful enough. The Japanese teachers then worked long hours into the evening making and applying paper flowers to the sign.

So now we always put the sign out the morning of. =)

40. Dark and Dreary

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:49:13 GMT

What a beautiful dark and dreary day! I love it! Dark skies, no wind, mild temperature - it's so invigorating. It's also a reminder of the passage of time, as the cherry blossoms are starting to come down in the slightest breeze, and a rain shower will knock off most of the ones still clinging to their trees.

I came to school today to find that D. had perfectly photocopied all the Year 3 writing books. Awesome.

Right now the children are moving desks and chairs, but I've elected to stay behind because of my ankle. Limping around with the others just gives me a chance to hurt myself again.

Eight days until payday! I'm going to try to reach it on $5 a day. (I'm trying to save some of my monthly spending money so I can travel to Tokyo in the summer. The savings are already earmarked for school.) Let's hope there aren't any more parties!

39. Sanjikai

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:58:27 GMT

Wow, it's HOT today! I had to take off my coat when I picked up my bike at the train station and went to MaxValu. What a gorgeous, gorgeous day. Too bad it's a Sunday - we wasted half of it sleeping in, and for the other half you're thinking about going back to work the next day. =)

~~K-sensei~~ A-sensei's nijikai was a great time. I had the wrong idea about it, though. I thought it was comparable to an after-reception dance or something. This was actually a complete second reception, meant for the A's larger sphere of friends and associates - there weren't any spaces for people who had gone to the reception and wanted to "keep partying." I was also surprised to learn that though we paid $70, the people who had gone to the reception would have had to pay, too - to the tune of $300. And the closest friends pay more - in these cases, the payment counts as your wedding gift. I think this would be a pretty cool system to have in North America - it would definitely ease the costs associated with weddings.

Several of the guests knew A-sensei because she had been their teacher, or field trip chaperone, or what have you. Is it just me, or would that be uncommon back in North America? I remember once being "invited" to write a few words for a favourite teacher's retirement party, but given that I wasn't being invited to that reception itself, I didn't go out of my way to find time to write them. I probably should have, but you get my point - we kind of keep the spheres separate. Perhaps lots of former students went to my aunt and uncle's wedding reception in a small PEI town, but that was a small town - that's different, isn't it?

At any rate, it's a testament to A-sensei's character that so many people who knew her starting on a professional basis went out of their way to come.

After the reception, we went to Casanova - it had been a while! Same great place, though. We sang lots of songs. Then we went to Ingrid's. I tried to sing "This Love" by Maroon 5 (especially for its loud, emotional bridge), but I had no voice left - we'd all left our voices at Casanova. My voice is still a little raspy this afternoon.

After Ingrid's, the group went to this other place, and I just sat and later slept in a corner. And then one of us got obsessed with finding a ramen place. This delayed some of the rest of us from being able to share a cab back, which is the only reason I was still hanging around after Casanova. To top it off? This person was obsessed with finding noodles even though she didn't have any money left! She would be borrowing for that AND for her share of the cab ride home! Sheesh! No hard feelings (we were all quite drunk) but next time, I'm biking in and biking back so I can decide for myself when to go home. I won't be able to drink very much that way, but drinking is overrated these days anyway, especially when it's $5 or $6 at each go.

38. Ankle Update

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:56:48 GMT

I went to the kindergarten to talk to K. I asked her what it felt like when she sprained her ankle. She said that she couldn't get up for a while afterwards; she felt that she could feel the muscles tearing and ripping. That definitely wasn't my experience, but K. definitely knew what she was talking about, and she put me in the right direction.

We talked about what happened to me, and she thought it would be a good idea to consult a doctor. K. says since the injury occurred at work, everything will be free to me - notably the 30% co-pay levied by Japan's national health care system. We went to find Mk., and she'll be taking me to the doctor at 5pm. We went into the high school and all the way down to the annex to meet with the first aid teacher. She immediately noted that my ankle was quite swollen, and she put a Band-Aid on the gash in order to cover it up for the cooling packs that she put on top. These things are great; they can last up to 10 hours (but probably less for me because my ankle is kind of warm right now), and they're not cold like ice, so you can keep them on for all that time. Ice works fine, but you can only apply it for 20, maybe 30 minutes at a go before it starts to hurt more than it helps, since it can freeze your cells.

So I guess maybe I'll be using the frozen green beans I got today for eating instead of healing. Right now I'm sitting in front of my computer, but my left leg is propped up over the headboard of my bed and supported by a pillow. It should be kept elevated.

The next time something like this happens, I'm definitely taking it more seriously. As K. put it, "Something hit you! You don't know what kind of damage that might have done."

* * *

Update: I went to the "hospital" - a cute little clinic, really - and had an x-ray performed just to be safe. The x-ray machine was like the paintings on Tracy Island, if you follow me. Anyway, there's no breakage - no torn ligaments or tendinitis. Just as my uncle said, it's a very bad bruise. I was given some pills and cold compresses. It looks like I'll be quite okay. Best of all, this gives me a great excuse (mostly to myself) not to dance at K-sensei's nijikai tomorrow. =)

37. Hopalong Will

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:57:57 GMT

I think I have a sprained left ankle. The inner side of that ankle is swollen a little, and it’s tender and slightly red. I was able to walk on it for most of yesterday after the injury from the morning, but over time it got worse – when I left work I was limping. When I got home from registering for Japanese classes at TOPIA, I was beginning to have to hop on one foot.

The at-rest pain and tenderness has subsided this morning, and I can move my foot around a bit now, but walking seems to be out of the question because it hurts too much when I try to put weight on it.

So as soon as Mk. (J.’s successor), comes to work (9am), I’ll ask her if she can recommend a clinic for me. Maybe she’ll even take me there. Since this injury occurred in the course of my work duties, I may even invite her to do so. =)

Yesterday was a nutty day. I had the first day care shift, which begins at 7:30. And that was fine, except that as I was getting ready that morning, I realized that I didn’t have the key to open up the school! (I had forgotten to take it with me the day before.)

I figured, okay, don’t panic, maybe there’ll be a door left open. Or maybe S-sensei or one of the other teachers will come in really early.

I walked over to the primary school, smiling awkwardly at the parents who were leaving their children in front of the locked-up school. Then as soon as the parents were gone, I started trying doors. I went around the back of the school too, but no luck – everything was locked.

Okay, well… how about the school office? And as luck would have it, our astute secretary was there. I told her I had forgotten my key, and she went to check out a board with keys hanging from it. “Shogako master key…” she murmured. But she couldn’t find it. Okay, cool, thanks, I’ll deal with this myself somehow. Maybe I’ll play soccer with the kids or something – by some miracle a soccer ball had been left around.

I went back, smiled and nodded to another parent, and then got to where the kids were hovering around. “Mr. Matheson, do you have the key?” one asked.

“No, I don’t!” I say in a slightly ashamed, awkward way.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeh!” the kids exclaim. Some of them are shivering. A ball is kicked around.

But before long (in fact, around 7:40 – this was a long ten minutes) I spotted what looked like H-sensei, the vice principal, headed for the primary school. I walked straight up to her, returned her good morning, and immediately apologized and stated that I had forgotten to take the day duty key the previous day. She laughed, so I guess this was forgivable, but I don’t intend to let it happen again. She let me in with her, and I raced up to the staff room, grabbed the room keys, and opened up the first room.

So picture this: a little group of kids all shivering and impatient to get inside a room that their teacher had been unable to open. I opened it, they all came in with their stuff, and then they ran right back outside again!

As I opened the second room, I was delirious, doubling over with laughter. (Later that day I’d be doubling over in pain.)

During my shift, I observed that the girl who had separation anxiety before came today without a fuss. A little bit of hesitation, sure. But it was much easier all around than before, and the father was able to wave ‘goodbye’ and part. Another father came with his son, and the father spoke pretty good English: “This is my son,” and had him and me introduced. “Pleased to meet you,” said the boy. This is encouraging; we need all the Anglophiles we can get!

Pretty soon I was relieved by F. – while F. is in excellent physical conditioning, it was the male teachers who were called to do some lifting. It was all about getting the annex ready for classes, as the entire east wing of the primary school save the teacher’s office will be closed for renovations this term. First we were moving coat and backpack cases from the foyer up to the appropriate floors.

In the course of one of the hauls, I got a wicked splinter. I couldn’t remove it on site, so I kept lifting. When we got back to the teacher’s office, Sh-sensei (one of the new teachers) took a needle and started working to uncover it. It was only slightly discomforting; he had clearly done this before. And after he had finished uncovering it, the first aid teacher arrived and finished the job with a tweezer-like implement. Some clear liquid and a Band-Aid later all was well. And this also prompted S-sensei to give us little gloves. “We are professionals,” he joked.

After that, we got into Hy-sensei’s car and headed for Maegawa Campus. (The main campus where most of us work is officially called the “Ojin Campus,” but it is rarely referred to as such.)

[Hmm… you know, maybe I won’t go to the doctor after all. Just now I was able to get up and go on two feet around the room without pain. I was even able to put all of my weight on the left foot painlessly. Maybe I’ll just see how the rest of today goes – if things worsen again, I’ll definitely go ask Mk. for a doctor. Or should I go now, while I still can? I don’t want to have to miss K-sensei’s nijikai tomorrow! Maybe I’ll stop by the office on my way to get an ice pack at the convenience store. I feel like I’ll be okay provided I take it easy.]

[I’m back, but Mk. wasn't at the office. I think I do want to see a doctor because while I can walk almost normally in my socks, with my shoes on it’s something else entirely. Interestingly, I can ride a bike fairly easily, provided that I push off with the right foot when accelerating.]

Maegawa Campus is near the centre of Tokushima City, and it was once the home of a thriving kindergarten program (and possibly more). But its programs are now being consolidated with those at the Ojin Campus, and the building is being sold. So it’s up to us to salvage what we can and haul it back to Ojin Ward in the S.G. truck.

I took lots of pictures while we were at this – it was fascinating. What was not so exciting was the prospect of moving a 7-column backpack and coat rack down the stairs and into the truck. There were multiple twists and turns and a staircase landing involved. And while we were navigating just the second corner, the bottom part of the heavy, unbalanced rack swung out and whacked me square in the ankle. “F**k!” I yelled, followed by, “Pardon my English.”

“Are you OK?” the others asked. I stood on one foot for a while. The pain actually grew somewhat before settling down to something bearable. I said I thought I’d be okay, though I found that I couldn’t be any help for the rest of the lift – it felt too painful to make sudden moves on the ankle. But after a while it wasn’t so bad – I was able to hop around and take some more pictures. I’d start off at a regular walk, find that it hurt, then start limping.

We got back to the annex and started unloading the truck. The cases went to various floors; the big monster went to the second floor. It took all eight of us to move it and even with eight it was still a reasonably heavy lift.

I finally relieved F. just a half-hour before lunch. Then I went to the post office on my bicycle. Perhaps this was the beginning of my folly, even though I felt almost 100% okay on the ankle (though it was tender).

After some afternoon paperwork, we were moving shelves and desks into the annex classrooms. Before terribly long, it was time to go home. But as I left the staff room, something had changed – after sitting down with F. to color some flash cards, I could no longer walk normally. I hopped and limped at a snail's pace back to my apartment.

I still needed to get to TOPIA before 6 to register for Japanese classes. In the absence of consistent information, I felt that I had to act right away or risk missing out. So I got on my bike at 5:25 and roared into town at breakneck speed. Or perhaps break ankle speed; I parked my bike, and as I jumped across the crosswalk in front of Tokushima Station trying to beat the signal, I reflected that what I was doing was probably not helping things.

I registered for the classes and bought a book. And when I got home? OH BOY. I was literally on one foot. I watched a movie (I couldn’t do much else) and when I took off my socks I noticed my ankle was visibly swollen, and there was a bit of a gash where the monster rack had struck. (Why didn’t they just build three or four two-column racks? They’re so much easier to move! Then again, they were probably built in situ anyway.)

I slept with my ankle elevated on pillows.

* * *

F. rents VHS movies from Satya; I rent DVDs. She pays 50 yen for a weekly rental, I pay 210.

How can they make any money renting VHS movies for 50 yen / cents? F. often wondered.

She found out when she returned two movies two days late. The fine was ¥1200 ($12). She was incredulous even as she told me about it. I mean, that’s $3 per movie, per day! OUCH. Not quite getting whacked with a massive shelving unit ouch, but ouch nonetheless.

So the night before last she took a movie for free. L. gave me the collection to take care of. It’s okay, I guess – and it’s free. It has the wrong Hamlet (this would be better) and the wrong Great Expectations (this would be outstanding), and the Bond movie is an excessively corny one (albeit enjoyable) – but there are no late fees.

* * *

Since I took today off with the aim of uploading photos, I’d better check to see if Mk. is back or get cracking on the photos. Until next time, I wish everyone good health!

36. April Chills

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:42:38 GMT

Wow, is it EVER cold at work today! I mean, it’d be nice walking weather, but it’s a bit too cold to sit and do work in. I had two shirts on and a coat and I was still freezing! I even drank a cup of coffee for its warmth instead of its caffeine. When I went out for lunch, the warmth of the sun made it warmer outside than it was inside. When I go back after lunch is over, I’ll be wearing a sweater.

I noticed that the portable heaters we had going in the staff room before were gone now, and I asked D. where they were.

“They’re in storage. O-sensei and a guy with a truck took them away yesterday.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s after April 1st! You don’t need heat anymore.”

Uh-huh. (He wasn’t buying it either.) Maybe it sounds less absurd in Japanese. And there’s no heat – the central system is shut off now, too.

D. also said that there’s no swimming before a certain day – it could be thirty degrees or more, yet people would look at you funny if you went to the beach (but we could still get away with it since we’re foreigners). And no air conditioning either, no matter how hot it gets. And, again, no heat on or after April 1st.

I figure this makes about as much sense as keeping the snowploughs and salters off the roads in the event of a December or April snowstorm, with the city citing the fact that it’s not winter and not the right time for clearing roads.

But this is Japan. =)

35. Moving Day

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:26:36 GMT

A lot of things are changing today, both at S.G. and in Japan as a whole. A set of fuel taxes intended for road projects has lapsed due to parliamentary deadlock, and so fuel prices at the pumps here could go down a little.

Unfortunately, prices for almost everything else are going up today: Milk, soy sauce, cooking oil, beer, natural gas, electricity, air fares, imported wheat, tissues, shochu… you name it! The individual price increases aren’t dramatic, but together they add up: the average household costs for a family are expected to rise by about $130 a year.

The price changes are getting news coverage again tonight. Many stations have taken off 25 yen a litre – the lowest price I’ve seen reported is 115 yen (just more than $1.15) a litre. Prices are jumping wildly. Some retailers are keeping their prices steady until they sell off the fuel they purchased at the higher price; some lowered their prices on March 31st and sold at a loss before the taxes lapsed.

And now they’re covering the road and infrastructure projects that are in danger of being suspended due to the lapse in the revenue from the fuel taxes. Those who know me know how this pulls at my heartstrings.

The news has been giving a lot of attention to the plight of the families of the Japanese abductees in the DPRK. The Japanese government requested that NHK pay special attention to the abduction issue in international broadcasts. I’ve been seeing new reports about the abductions every time I watch the domestic news, especially the hour-long late evening edition.

We had all hands on deck in the gym today for the introductions of the new teachers. “New” means any teacher who began after the start of the last academic year, so it applies to anyone who started from May 2007 onwards. D. is the only foreign teacher who wasn’t “new” for this academic year, but he spoke anyway.

After the ceremony, we got our new teaching assignments. This past “year” I had Maths 1 and 6 (I could barely keep up with the Year 6s!), Sciences 3, 4, 5, and 6, and Year 4 was my English homeroom. This year I’ll have Maths 7, 8, and 9 (yes, the junior high! I hope I’m not in over my head!), Art 2, Life 1, Sciences 3, 4, 5, and 6, and Year 3 will be my English homeroom. The workload will be a bit greater, but the upside is that everything but English and Art is once a week, and Art is only twice because there are two Year 2 classes. I’m happy not to have to be losing my voice trying to keep two classes of year one students focused on math three times a week – each. Let’s see how they do with art.

Before and (mostly) after lunch, we were changing desks. This caused a great deal of chaos and commotion as the teacher’s office turned into a giant Rubik’s Cube. A few of the other teachers were more patient than others. But somehow we got through it. I wish I’d known that this would have to happen – I was caught completely off guard and I would have liked to have prepared for the move in advance. Do you know how much stuff teachers generally have in their desks? And it goes double for the Japanese teachers – so I automatically forgive any impatience on their part.

Things got quiet for a while when the Japanese teachers had a meeting. Then it was time to move things again, but this time it was fun. Years 1 through 4 are moving to the junior high for this term. I guess I’ll call it the “Shogako annex.” This is happening because the primary school’s air conditioning system will be undergoing repairs this summer. They even had a guy in today to reroute the appropriate junior high speakers to the primary school’s PA system. [Update: I've since learned that this building used to be the junior high - it's currently vacant. The junior high enrolment had gotten so small that the whole operation was moved to the high school.]

As D. put it early this morning, “Just accept the fact that it’s going to be chaotic today – we’re not going to get any work done.” And he was right. But tomorrow is another day!

* * *

Last night I went searching for a place to get a cheaper haircut – L. told me about a string of places across the river. I found one barbershop that looked kind of sketchy, so I kept going and I found a large barbershop that took the whole first floor of a three-story building. Perhaps…? Well, I don’t read Japanese yet, but I saw “4000” in pink numbers and “3500” in blue numbers. In other words, it was $40 for a ladies haircut, but “only” $35 for men. That’s just crazy. I want a haircut, not a gourmet meal.

D. had suggested that I should just by a pair of clippers, so I went to my favourite electronics store further down the same street and looked around there. I found a really nice clipper with a rechargeable battery and an adjustable guide for $39. They had cheaper clippers too, but either the guides were flimsy or the unit had to be plugged in to an outlet for use.

The funny thing is, this very morning I found another pair of clippers while I was fumbling in the closet for my suit. I briefly considered returning the unopened new ones, but then I thought the better of it – firstly, clippers and shavers and hair things like that are kind of personal items. Secondly, the new clippers would be mine to keep forever.

I was telling F., M2, and C. [C. will henceforth stand for the new primary school teacher, and its usage will be retired for the former kindergarten teacher who will hereafter be known as “Co.”] about this this morning, and D. agreed that keeping my new clippers was a very good idea. The ones in my apartment actually belong to an unknown third party! And… um… they were last used for a “Shave [former intern] Birthday Party.” That in itself doesn’t sound bad, but D. was careful to mention that they shaved only his torso at Ingrid’s.

And on that note, I wish everyone a happy April! The truth is way more interesting than anything I could make up.

34. Day Care

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:36:31 GMT

We’re between academic years right now at S.G.. This doesn’t mean there’s a long vacation; the students get two weeks, the teachers get an extra half-hour for lunch for two weeks. The new school year begins a week from tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll be having a ceremony to introduce the new teachers (ranging back from F. and me, who came in January, to the two new Japanese teachers who arrived at the primary school this morning).

Since so many parents work, they pay a little extra to leave their children at the school during days of the intersession, where they receive supervision. This morning I opened up the day care classrooms at 7:30 and kept an eye out for a new arrival – a new Year 1 student that K-sensei told me would be starting today. (“Please take care of a lot,” she wrote on an adhesive note.)

Her father brought her, and doubtless he was probably ultimately on his way to work, but she wouldn’t let him leave. It was a hard case of separation anxiety. I felt helpless, because I couldn’t say anything to the father, and I couldn’t say anything to the daughter except, “Hey, c’mon in and meet some people!”

As things turned out, the father stayed in the day care room with her for over an hour. During this time, the younger girls already there took an interest in her and tried to cheer her up. Seeing that made me drop any worries I might have had about this particular student. Nevertheless, when H-sensei came by, and sort of took over from the father, the girl cried again. I guess I can see how it would be scary. And even in non-scary situations there were times when I was that age when I didn’t want to be separated from certain people, and I’d do or say nearly anything just to stall for time.

When things were quiet, the kids played chess, did their homework (perhaps for their private supplementary classes some of them take elsewhere), and a few of my former Year 4s were even making a little comic book.

Meanwhile, I practised writing hiragana in my Japanese kana workbook, a present from S. A few of the kids took great interest in this, and when I’d make a style mistake, the kids would make me erase it and start over. “Ms. K., no!” they’d say, intimating that K-sensei was pretty rigorous when it came to scripting style.

It was cold and rainy yesterday, and that continued into today. The rain let up at lunchtime, at which point the baseball players went out and removed the standing water from their dirt-surfaced practise field using dustpans and buckets. Man.

After day care and all afternoon, D. and I worked on decorations for the opening ceremony next week. Usually there’s seasonally-themed student work that can be put up for such occasions, but since we’re between academic years, we foreign teachers have to put up decorations instead. The decorations the teachers made last year have disappeared, so we’ve had to start pretty much from scratch again. This time we’re going to laminate these babies – there’s no way this stuff is getting thrown out again if I have anything to say about it! I’m sure F. and I don’t want to be cutting out construction paper cherry blossoms and coloring in enlarged clip-art daffodils in March and April 2009. Tomorrow, we’ll find more spring-themed poems to put up.

K-sensei's post-wedding-reception nijikai is on Saturday, and I’m eagerly looking forward to it. There’ll be karaoke, open bar, food – the whole shebang. It’s a way to keep the good times rolling and get lots of people out without having to add hundreds or thousands of dollars to the cost of the reception. Compare it to an after-reception dance – those are not unheard of back in PEI, and I’ve occasionally witnessed my aunt and uncle ducking out to them. I could have, too, I was told.

The sanjikai will take place in a parking lot in front of a convenience store.

33. Barbeques and Movies

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:02:23 GMT

Oh, I’m the scholar with the full belly again. I just got back from a barbeque at Mt.’s. Ah, it was so good to have some meat that didn’t come out of a Styrofoam, cardboard container, or McDonald’s wrapper for a change.

I went to the post office again on Friday to mail a batch of postcards. This went well – very well compared to last time – and I even had time to go and rent a movie and then come home and have my lunch. Much better. Tomorrow I’m going to go to a home store that L. recommended to find some proper envelopes for mailing discs.

Mt. is leaving S.G. tomorrow, and leaving Japan later on in the week. He’ll have to leave his wife and children, but in Australia he’ll be making triple what he does here. In addition to the barbeque, we were at his place on Friday night to watch movies. We were going to watch Harry Potter – actually, we were going to watch that at my place, but then it got moved to his place and etc.. etc.. anyway, this has taught me that if there’s a movie I need to watch I’m just going to bloody well watch it myself, because it’s a heck of a lot easier! That’s also the last time I offer anyone the chance to watch the first movie before we watch the second together. I mean, it seemed like a good idea, but in execution – nah.

So at Mt.’s nobody really wanted to watch Harry Potter, and I was only watching them in sequence because I hadn’t before – I’d invited F. (and later D.) to watch with me, and this is what it turned into. Anyway, I can’t say that I blame them, because they’d all already seen it.

So I suggested, hey, we can watch Artifact!

So we did. It went okay – Artifact is able to keep the attention of people who really want to pay attention, but it’s not polished enough to consistently (though it can occasionally) draw people away from their side conversations. They were more impressed with the logistics of us having made the thing in 2000 than they were about the movie itself. And I can understand that.

Then we watched a movie that was very successful at keeping our attention: Babel. It was more “Babel” than its creators probably intended – the DVD only provided Japanese subtitles, so we only understood the English portions and were left to guess at the rest. But it was a powerful, viscerally-intense movie – even though you do have to be septlingual (or have subtitles) to understand it at a literal level.

And tonight M. has invited us over to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. (We watched Temple of Doom, its prequel, about a month ago.) Before long, we’ll be caught up and ready for all the big upcoming sequels! =)

29. Mountains and Valleys

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:56:51 GMT

The trip west into the mountains was spectacular. (It’ll be great to get the photos up, but I’m currently more than three months behind on photos!)

The road to get there was really interesting. First, there was the Tokushima Expressway. Picture the two-lane portions of Highway 101 but with a centre median, periodic tunnels, and some elevated sections, and you’ll get the idea. There are also service centres, parking areas, toll gates – all for a two lane freeway. It’s really quite something. Although I guess it doesn’t matter much if they do it this way since if they need to build another carriageway they’ll have to build new tunnels and bridges anyway – the landscape isn’t readily comparable to Nova Scotia, nor should the construction methods be.

We get up there, and woah was it gorgeous. And high – F. and I briefly clambered up some trails near the first place we stopped, and I found myself short of breath with alarming speed.

Our next stop was the vine bridge at Kazura-bashi, in Iya Valley. We’d be going to another set of bridges later, so some of us saved our ¥500 and watched the proceedings from the road. F. dropped a water bottle into the river, and I was tempted to try and get it, but I was discouraged by one participant’s patriarchal attitude and the concurrent steep drop – it might have been doable, but it wasn’t worth the risk. (We all like to feel that we’re making our own decisions, and I know my own record is far from perfect in allowing others to do so. Adulthood is complicated.)

So we drive on to see some more rope bridges – although not before we fail to take a detour, dead-end ourselves on the construction zone, take a third road for a few minutes before we realize it won’t get us anywhere, then double back to find the proper detour (the only significant part of the journey that was unpaved), and then, at length, rejoin the “main” road.

We finally reached the Oku-Iya Double Vine Bridges. By now we’re quite a long way off the beaten path. (Wikipedia: “Oku-Iya is still relatively difficult to access and thus the natural beauty is largely undisturbed.” Tokushima Tourist Map: “Access: 2 hours and 20 minutes by bus to Nagora from JR Awa-Ikeda Station, then a 1 hour walk.”) Now this little park was really something. First of all, it was still officially closed for the winter (but due to open in a week or so) – the area was all but deserted, and even the drink machine on the other side of the street was shut off.

The closure didn’t stop us, and we gaily hopped over the ropes and signs and went down the path towards the large bridge. We gingerly crossed; the bridge was in a state of mid-repair, which was probably why, or part of the reason why, the park was still closed.

On the other side there was a metal staircase to take people down to the river level where you could set on some big rocks at a confluence with a falling stream.

Wow. Bar none, seeing that was my highlight of the trip.

Back up in the woods on the far side there was a little picnic area, as well as a mini-ropeway crossing – you basically climb in a box and haul yourself across with the rope. The “ride” was still there to be used, totally free and totally unsupervised. (Awesome.) So we had fun with that for a bit.

K., one of the Australians, also found a little bit of snow still surviving in the forest shade – it was pretty icy and grainy, but she still had a blast picking up chunks and throwing them at people. It took a while for her to realize that that actually hurt. (In fact, I think it took M. winging a few chunks back at her.)

After having our bag lunches there, we got back on the road and headed east. We were planning to head NE and rejoin the expressway and civilization in general a bit closer to the capital than we had left – we were going to make a loop, in other words.

We climbed and climbed – the snow that before was only on the mountain tops was now on the sides of the road. We got to this tiny mountain hamlet on the north face of Mt. Tsurugi where there was actually an intersection. The first way took us through the hamlet and to a tunnel, but the tunnel was unplowed and a sign said that the route wasn’t recommended.

Okay, so we turned around and tried the other option, which would take us north. We even stopped the van so K. could get out and play in the snow, and most of us joined in.

We climbed for a bit, but then the ploughed portion of the road ended abruptly – the road ahead, a steep downhill stretch leading to who knows where, was covered with several inches of thick, slushy, wet snow.

We could have done it with snow chains, or we could have done it with four-wheel drive. But in a rear-wheel drive minivan with summer tires, there was no way we could go on with a reasonable expectation of getting out again. (And gingerly sliding down a hill is one thing – coming back up is quite another.)

[In fact, today, more than a week later, Mt. said, “Geez, I’m glad we didn’t go down there – we’d still be stuck up there!”]

We backed up until we found a corner where we could do an “eighty-point turn” and get turned around. On our way back to the intersection outside the hamlet, we told some folks in another car that the road was impassable, with K. forwarding the key Japanese words to Mt.

Let’s take a second to talk about these roads. Many Canadians reading this and thinking about mountain roads might think of roads like the Cabot Trail or the Icefields Parkway. Well, those are like the autobahn compared to the mountain roads in Tokushima prefecture. These roads are narrow, twisty, and one-lane, excepting a few places where they’re widening the road by building a big concrete ledge further out onto the river. There is no visibility around the (innumerable) corners due to the terrain. You use well-placed mirrors to see around the corners, except for the corners where the mirrors are broken or have fallen, in which case you use prayer.

There’s certainly enough traffic up there – many people live there. We saw lots of little hamlets and villages, and even some moderately-sized towns – all connected by these one-lane roads. The infrastructure was amazing; how some people can sleep at night in their houses with six or seven stories worth of concrete and/or steel holding them up against the side of the road above a river hundreds of feet below is a mystery to me. There were tunnels, bridges, schools… we thought about what it would be like to be a JET participant in this area and wondered if they’d spend more time teaching or looking out the windows. The schools were adorably nestled in the most interesting little nooks and crannies, complete with their baseball diamonds and play areas.

There’s public transit up there too, as we found out when we rounded a corner and nearly plunged into a low-floor city bus, with its digital routesign on and everything. An hour or so later we drove by a poor gaijin backpacker waiting at a bus stop – “You missed your bus!” someone shouted, if I recall correctly.

There were a few of these, “BUS!” and “TRUCK!!” and “S**T!!!” incidents (and I’m quoting myself here), but for the most part we were quite safe.

The catch about living in this part of the prefecture, then, isn’t so much the roads, but the isolation. On the plus side, you’d learn Japanese quickly – you’d have to! On the other hand, you’d have to make the three-hour trip to Tokushima City (Kitajima, strictly speaking – a bedroom community) just to see a movie. I was doing a websearch the other day and I found a weblog by a JET participant who had lived in Miyoshi City. (I found it because I was looking for movie showtimes, and she had described a trip to the Fuji Grand to see one.) The title of her weblog? “This Isn’t Tokyo.”

And it’s not just movies – it’s real supermarkets, big box stores, entertainment, socializing – almost every facet of your life could be radically different living up there from what it would be down here. Now I realize why Masae, who lives in Narita, was so concerned about me coming to live down here. (Her “Why Japan?” was inquisitive; her “Why Tokushima?” was warmly but absolutely incredulous.) I knew I would be living in the city, but I didn’t realize that there was such a big disconnect between the city and the rest of the prefecture (excepting a narrow strip of civilization that exists along the expressway / major river). Take the difference between Sheet Harbour and downtown Halifax and add an order of magnitude and then you have it. Hey, at least Sheet Harbour is accessible by two-lane road from four directions!

We finally worked our way back to the road we had detoured onto – the sun was on its way down, casting a picturesque golden light on the trees and gravel. A flagman pulled us into a new queue behind a small truck. Construction. And the wait would be thirty-five minutes! (Which made sense, considering that there wasn’t another lane to divert traffic onto – with a one-lane road, a lane closure is a road closure.)

We weren’t mad or anything, though. We just simplified our plans: instead of going to a historic village, we’d just go to an onsen, and then home. F. got out and had a Yoga session with C. – the rest of us walked around, took pictures… some had a swordfight…

The last stop of our tour was the onsen, which overlooked a large town. This was the part that I had been secretly dreading – these baths are usually split, but they are in the nude.

Still, once I got adjusted to that idea, the rest was easy. Even the keystrap for your locker just wraps neatly around your wrist. There are little booths inside the bath area proper where you sit down and shower – soap and shampoo are even provided!

After washing and rinsing thoroughly, we went outside to the outdoor hot bath. We talked with a Japanese guy who spoke English not just fluently but comfortably - he knew a lot of our colloquialisms and canned expressions and how to use them. He had listened to Voice of America for many years and gotten a taste for the “living language,” as he put it. Cool.

We hung around a little while longer, but after a while at an onsen it just becomes time to go. (It’s not like there are swimming pools and waterslides – at least there weren’t at this one. =) And while an onsen isn’t the sort of place you’d go every day, it wasn’t expensive – it was only ¥1000 (about $10).

After the onsen, it was time for long trip back, punctuated by a convenience store stop and a lot of conversation. We settled up with Mt. for the gas and expressway tolls, and called it a night.

As beautiful as those mountain towns were, I thank my lucky stars we’re in the capital!