Ladamania!

I have been in Japan for nearly two years, taken 11 gigabytes worth of pictures, and have actually post about 20 of them on my website. Ah, the diary of a procrastinator. However, I’m a big believer in “Better Late than Never” so starting now I’ll be posting pictures chronicling my time here in Japan. No better place to start than at the beginning – when I first arrived in Japan and at my new home.

It was late August and the weather was hot hot hot. I think the first few days for any new ALT in Japan is a blur, and mines not much different. It didn’t help that I had barely heard from my predecessor and had no idea what my town or living conditions would be like. The two days in Tokyo flew by (with the help of karaoke and drinks with a group of rowdy Aussies) and suddenly I was being picked up at the prefectural offices by my supervisor (who speaks no English) and my ALT co-worker. We drove to my new town where I sign up for my Alien Registration Card (Gaijin Card), a bank account and other assorted things. Then we go to my new place . . . which was huge (for Japan) and half as much in rent as I thought it was going to be. Not a bad first few days in Japan.

[Show as slideshow]

Forwarding this site from Drawn. Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre: Hand cut silhouettes containing a variety of play on words, jokes, and witty observations. Some of my faves:

Check out their shop for prints and fun little “dollar dreadfuls”.

Slightly related is Hammerpress - cool old style ornate posters and cards.

I recently purchased and put up this poster of the Joyo Kanji, the 1945 Japanese characters for everyday reading, from White Rabbit Press (creators of the best kanji flash cards out there and great source of Japanese texts outside Japan).

I’m not sure if this poster is motivating or depressing. As you can see, it’s huge (the map of Japan is a standard 2ftx3ft just to give you an idea of how massive this poster is). I can read and write the green and blue kanji (required for Japanese Language Proficiency test 3+4) and at least recognized about half of the purple kanji (JLPT 2) but even then, that’s roughly half of the Joyo Kanji. Somedays I think Japanese is just too impossible, but I do my best to ganbare (endure).

Book wise, I think Da Vinci Code had a better story, while A&D was more interesting on the “research” side of things. Movie wise, the Da Vinci Code was such crap. There was no suspense and Tom Hanks and Audrey Tantou had sub-zero chemistry. There is a touch of suspense in A&D, and Ayelet Zurer manged to give her character at least the appearance of depth despite the script writers’ best efforts. Plus A&D has Ewan McGregor and he usually has the ability of making everything a little better. Still methinks something was lost in the adaption of both movies. Would have rather seen Wolverine or Star Trek (if either were out here in Japan!).

BTW, the American cardinal with his “aw shucks” accent was hilarious.

This was a Flash Movie Review.

No doubt there is a lot of bad English to be found in Japan. Even in Tokyo, where one would thing it would be easy to find a native English speaker, there are plenty of egregious “What the eff is that sign trying to say” signs and pamphlets. But even sneakier are the little weird English mistakes that creep into textbooks and entrance examinations. Some are obvious, like the frequent dropping of articles (a, an, the), but some look so close to correct that even I wonder if it’s a mistake or not. One of these cases happened today as I read the 9th grade textbook:

• There’re, a contraction of “there are”

I can understand how this ended up in the textbook; virtually every other pronoun + to be combination has a contraction (I’m, you’re, she’s). Still, I can say with reasonable confidence that I have never heard “there’re” uttered by anyone, native speaker or otherwise. Contractions are suppose to make something easier to say. How would I even say “there’re”? The closest I can figure is that it rhymes with “herre” of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” fame. In katakana-ized English “ar” sounds turn into a Boston-style “ah” sound, so “there are” would be pronounced “zeh-ah ah”. You know how my student’s pronounced “there’re” today? “Zeh-ah’ah”. Yep, about the same. So not only did the textbook introduce a fake contraction, they introduced a fake contraction that doesn’t actually “contract” anything! Fortunately, this is the only time I’ve ever seen “there’re” in Japan, verses the dozens of times I’ve seen “let’s” combined with “~ing” (Let’s playing soccer!). Thus, I declare a low threat level of  ”there’re” corrupting English in Japan.

Continuing my kyuushoku (school lunch) series.

Monday, April 13
Some kind of fish
5-types salad with a bunch of stringy veggies
Soup with Tofu and cabbage (Dosanko)
Rice
Milk with a Kobaton having a picnic
Rice crackers from one of my teachers
This is one of those Japanese-style meal where I don’t know half of what I’m eating. I’m really not a fan of school lunch fish, but I remember this one being decent. I liked the soup. The rice crackers were a nice touch.

Tuesday, April 14
Egg omelet-y thing with veggies and tiny fish
Salad with beans, carrot and some potato-like substance
Seaweed and Tofu soup
Wakame Rice (rice with seaweed in it)
Milk (Kobaton Picnic)
Wow, seaweed-arific! No less than 3 of the four main parts of this meal had seaweed. I like seaweed rice, so that’s no big deal. I don’t mind it in the soup except that as you can see, they put a LOT in there. I was enjoying the omelety thing until I realized it had tiny fish in it (baby sardines). What the what? Salad was decent if oily.

Wednesday, April 15
Two fried shrimp and sauce
Salad with Thousand Island dressing
Kosome Soup (broth with bacon bits and lettuce in it)
Bread and Jam
Milk (Kobaton reading the paper!)
This is what is call a ‘western style’ lunch, even though it’s doubtful anyone in the west has had all of these foods at the same time. The shrimp were pretty awesome, salad and soup was kind of bland, and the big hunk of bread with jam was very random, but I still ate it all.

Thursday, April 16
Tofu burger patty
Salad with sesame dressing
Pork soup with the potato-y bits again and this weird squash-like substance
Rice
Milk
Honestly, before I came to Japan, the only time I ate just the patty of a burger like a steak was in a Lean Cuisine Salisbury Steak frozen dinner. But here, they have these burger patty all the time (usually called ‘hamburg steak’). Today was a tofu hamburg. and it was actually pretty tasty (the sauce is what makes it). Salad is basically the same as the day before except with sesame dressing/sauce, which is pretty good. Nothing too remarkable about the soup or rice.

Friday, April 17
Egg roll
Salad with seaweed, shrimp and squid
Ramen soup and noodles
Milk
Orange yogurt
As much as I want to like kyuu-shoku egg-rolls, they put me off a little bit. Why? Because they’re filled with some kind of unidentifiable mush. It tastes good, but the texture is kind of bleh. Salad is a bit nasty because of the presence of rubbery squid. The soup is fine. And it’s nice to be rewarded with some orange yogurt at the end of a long kyuushoku week.

And that’s the week in kyuushoku.

One thing that’s frustrating about being a new ALT is no one seems to tell you what you’re going to be doing once you reach Japan. I used to think this was a JET thing, but talking to ALTs in other companies, it seems to be and anywhere thing. It is ESID and all that, but at the very least it’s good to see what other ALTs are doing. So as a service to you new JETs and other ALTs, here is a day in the life of me, a typical junior high school ALT.

6:30am Alarm goes off, it’s not really an alarm clock, it’s my phone playing Closer by Ne-Yo. Shut-up!
7:00 Get out of bed, this is actually early for me.
7:30 Make my toast and coffee and Skype my mother. Yeah, I call her often in the morning, shut up again!
8:00 hang up and get ready for work
8:15 call mom again quickly to show her a ridiculous video from youtube.
8:20 okay, seriously gotta get ready for work now
8:25 Ah, crap it’s burnables day, I gotta get my trash! (it’s okay since I live literally around the corner from my school) 
8:35 Walk up the stairs to school, only 5 minutes late, sweet. Scheduled for four lessons today
8:50 Go to first class, 9th graders who are just starting to learn passive form
9:15-9:40 the kids and I do a word-search puzzle. I win, bwa-ha-ha!
9:45 free period, jump on computer to check news, email
10:00-10:40 Do lesson in the JET language course book which I’m determined to finish this year, dammit!
10:50 another free period, hop on computer again and start writing this post
11:15 JTE hands me schedule. Since Golden week is coming up, there’s only 6 work days over the next two weeks, sweet
11:20 realize next Tuesday and Thursday I’ll have 4 lessons in a row, ugh, I hate that!
11:25 okay, gaijin, stop hogging the computer
11:50 4th period, 8th graders just learning past tense form, I spend most of the class period walking around correcting papers.
12:40 Oh God, it’s finally lunch time! Today’s lunch was an improvement over recent lunches, but came with drinkable yogurt instead of milk, WTF
1:45 5th period, 7th graders, who are best to teach because they still are in ‘English is Fun’ mode from elementary school. Don’ worry, it gets beaten out of them by the end of the year. We do a lesson that I planned; capital letters review and basic vocab like “picture”, “window” etc. I have them play a memory game.
2:45 6th period, another 8th grade class. Basically the same at the other 8th grade class except this time someone asks me how to spell ‘Parisian’. I had to look it up.
3:45 cleaning time, or for me, ‘Lauren gets back on the computer’ time. The cleaning soundtrack is this bizarre high speed mix of various classical and Souza songs
3:55 Ack, the music is still playing! It’s on a loop! Make it stop!
4:00 15 minutes, and I’m outta here!
4:15 successfully goofed around on the internet for 15 minutes, now time for me to say ‘O-saki ni shitsurei shimasu’ which is Japanese for ‘Later, bitches!’.
4:25 After a quick trip to the combini, I’m home.
5:00 Ugh, I really should get to the grocery store, the big one which is about a 15 minute bike ride away, bleh
6:30 Okay, bought a ton of stuff at the store, and now I’m finally home for the day!

So there it is, a day in the life of Lauren the ALT.

The new school year started last week, along with a new round of school lunches (kyuushoku). School lunch here in Japan is pretty nuts, you never seem to get the same lunch twice. and it’s full of veggies that you’ve never even heard of. For the most part I find them to be pretty delicious, though the occasional inedible dish is served up once in a while. It’s the start of my 2nd (and final) full school year in Japan, so I’m going to post pics of every lunch I have for my memories and your enjoyment. Here we go!

Thursday, April 9
Chicken Nuggets
‘Heathly Salad’
Pork Curry and rice
Coffee Milk
They pulled out all the stops for the first lunch of the year. Chicken Nuggets? Curry and Rice? Coffee milk? Awesome! The only ‘miss’ in this equation is the ‘healthy salad’ with limp cucumbers and slippery, rubbery bits of lettuce. Still, I could wash it down with my coffee milk so overall the school lunch gets a good rating.

Friday April 10
Tempura’d Squid
Bean Sprout and Spinach salad
Udon noodles and broth with mushrooms
Milk with Kobaton reading the paper
I knew a repeat of the awesomeness of Thursday’s kyuushoku was unlikely, but it’s an awfully big jump from curry AND chicken nuggets to a freakin’ tempura’d squid (which was rubbery and unnaturally square). The salad was pretty bitter. The meal was thankfully rescued by the udon, which I’m always a big fan of, even in cheap school-lunch form.

I figured I’d take a moment from my regular lack-of-focus blogging and congratulate the shortlisters for the 2009 JET Program. One of you lucky kids will be working with me come August, so you better be cool! Or at least tolerable.

Anyway, you’re coming to Japan and I’m sure there are a million things going through your head right now. Here’s just some quick unsolicited, half-baked advice on what to do now that you’re just a few months away from a year (or more) in Japan.

Do save your money: Local government offices were feeling the budget crunch long before the current economic slowdown. As a result, there seems to be an increasing number of BOE’s asking their ALTs to pay for the start-up costs of their living arrangements, such as key money (think of it as large deposit . . . that you will never get back). Usually you are warned if you have to pay such fees, but never-the-less some JETs get it sprung on them the day they get here. Even if you are lucky enough to not have to pay key money, you will likely be asked to pay your rent and other utilities the day you get to your town . . . and weeks before your first paycheck. Many contracting organizations will give ALTs a loan if the start-up costs are high, but you don’t want to spend your first few months in Japan indebted to your C.O. Save as much as you can.

Do learn *some* Japanese: If you don’t speak a word of Japanese, there’s no better time to start than now. JET will send you a beginners Japanese textbook in your welcome package. It comes with a CD and a chart of kana (the phonetic Japanese scripts). Practice 5 kana a week and you can have it mastered by the time you reach Japan. Also, you’ll probably meet people like the mayor of your town, superintendent, and principals when you first reach your placement, so it’s a good idea to practice basic intros. Don’t worry about it being perfect, you’ll likely be complimented on your Japanese no matter your skill level.

Do read the General Information Handbook: The GIH is awkwardly large and makes for some dry reading, but it’s important because your supervisor will have the same book. Your supervisor will not any kind of ALT affairs expert, heck, they are likely to not speak English at all, so this book (which has Japanese on the left and English on the right) can be valuable when trying to sort something out. Read through at least once before you come here and highlight the important bits. Oh, and do watch the ‘JET Life’ movie. Yeah, it’s cheesy, but for someone like me who hadn’t been to Japan before JET, it helps you visualize what your life will be like.

Do whatever needs to be done now!: It’s all too easy to think, “Eh, I have till the end of July to do this”. You will be shocked how quickly the end of July comes around. If JET sends you anything that requires a response, don’t even look at the deadline, just do it and send it back. Don’t depend on your coordinator too much to tell you exactly what you need to send and where you need to send it. They’re busy getting ready to send dozens of people to Japan (and, of course, some are less of top of things than others). This applies especially to alternates; I understand not wanting to spend the money on the physical, the FBI check or the tax forms, but if you’re serious about going to Japan and want to be able to go on short notice, it is in your best interest to get this stuff done now.

Don’t worry about teaching (yet): When browsing JET forums around this time of year, there’s always people who are already worried about things like what their self-intro to their students will be, or what lessons they should have planned out. I have one word of advice: Relax. First off, at this point you have no clue what age/level you’ll be teaching. Second, after you arrive here, you’ll have around a month before you even teach a class. That’s plenty of time to sort out what your JTEs will expect from you in class.

Don’t assume you will recreate the awesomeness of the semester you spent in Japan 2 years ago: Studying here and working here are two different things. Many of ALTs I’ve meet that have been less than satisfied with their experiences are people who studied abroad. During study abroad, you’re in an urban/suburban setting, surrounded by people your age, are being taken care of by a host family or other student housing, and able to be constantly doing non-academic things because, let’s face it, college in Japan is not the most difficult thing in the world. JET’s certainly not the most difficult job in the world either, but you do have to be at work 8-4, Monday-Friday, and you’ll be (likely) in a rural setting, living alone in a town of sweet little obaa-sans. I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t let your previous Japan experience shape your JET expectations too much.

Don’t decided how long you wanna stay just yet: When I surf JET message boards, I’m always surprised to see a lot of people saying, before they even set foot in their towns, ‘I’m gonna do JET for 3-5 years, then move to (such and such place in Japan) and work there’ or ‘I’m gonna only do a year, then come back and do this and that.’ I understand having a goal, but sometimes it turns into an obligation you put on yourself. Don’t stay in a terrible placement just because you promised yourself ‘three years’, and don’t leave a great placement just because you told everyone you only do a year then go to grad school. Just say, ‘My contract is a year, and we’ll see after that’.

And last, do be freakin’ excited! You’re going to Japan! Don’t let the nay-sayers diminish that by telling you, ‘A desk job in Japan is like a desk job anywhere else’, it’s certainly is not. There will be awesome moments and awful moments, but it will always be pretty interesting.

I recently saw one of my teachers using a funky/cute little camera that spit out little credit-card sized instant photos. My curiosity was piqued so I scoured the web to figure what this camera was. It was a Fujifilm Cheki 25 from their “Instax” series. A trip to Bic-Camera and a few thousand yen later, I had one of my own.

You may ask, “Lauren, you have a perfectly good 8mp digital camera. Why on earth do you want an instant camera that takes fuzzy little pictures that looks like they’re from the 70s?” Actually, the retro look is half the appeal for me. There’s something about the high contrast colors, slightly blurred shapes and fishlensy quality that my catch-every-painful-detail digital camera doesn’t match. And that’s another thing, while you can check a digital photo imediately, delete the bad ones, and Photoshop the decent ones, it can’t duplicate the experience of taking an instant picture and watch it develop right before your eyes.

But I think what truely drove me to buy an instant camera was fact that it delivers me a photo to hold. In these days where I’m much more likely to get an email rather than a letter, buy music from iTunes rather a CD from a store, or look at friends photo’s on Facebook rather than in a photo album, I just really love being able to hold the little photos with thick, white borders in my hands.

Okay, enough of all this, let’s look at the Cheki Photos!

[Show as slideshow]