Gender Differences

Image by Not Quite A Photographr

 

Today in work I saw something horrible. 

 

A spider as big as my hand. 

 

The girls and I all freaked out while the boys all ran to have a look.

Dear Disney

 

You do not need to make your characters extra-cute for the Japanese market. 

Look at poor Donald. Where is the sarcastic, lazy, world-weary duck we know and love? You’ve turned him into a super-enthusiastic member of the school band. 

As for Mickey, you’ve robbed the poor bastard of his mouth. 

There’s just no call for this kind of thing. 

 

That is all.

Dear Department Store

 

Where do you get such creepy mannequins? 

I kind of want one. 

 

But not these ones. 

 

They give me nightmares.

Japanese Teachers Wear The Darndest Things

 

The Japanese woman who works as a teacher at the school wears what can only be described as Christmas jumpers (knitted sweaters). All goddamn winter I’ve been looking at fair isle prints, snowflakes, reindeer, Santas and general hideousness.

 

Today she had a treat for me – she wore a long-sleeved t-shirt. Light blue, silver writing. 

 

FOR MY CYCLE

 

Is that not just a little… TMI?

Love and Hate

 

real book

 

 

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with Japan. I’m pretty sure all immigrants to all countries do. Unless it’s a hate-hate relationship, in which case I hope you get your extradition granted. 

 

Overall, the love outbalances the hate, or else we’d just go home. Even if it’s just the love of the money we make. 

 

HATE – Japanese drivers

Holy crap these people cannot drive. For reals. Parking in the middle of the road on a curve to go to the post office/vending machine/whatever. Driving with no lights. Doing 120kph on the expressway (limit is 80), sometimes with no lights. Giant scary trucks changing lanes without warning, careening into spaces 2 feet longer than the length of their truck. Sometimes with no lights, sometimes with thousands of multi-coloured blinking lights (and those ghetto blue lights fixed underneath the truck to light up the road). Reversing onto a road FAST, without looking. Breaking lights. 

 

I know this shit happens everywhere. There’s a crucial difference though. In other places, the perpetrators are assholes. In Japan, they’re just not paying attention. Which is worse. An American almost-making-it as they try to get around the car park against the one-way system is actually less annoying than an 80-year-old Japanese lady creeping around the car park at 2kph peering at every space and not noticing that you’re reversing away from them. You can sort of respect someone who tries to get away with something. Someone who’s just oblivious is so much more irritating. 

 

LOVE – No matter what you do, no matter how bad/assholish your driving is, Japanese people will never ever flip you off. In fact, if you cut them off and then bow a little (while still seated in your car, obviously), chances are they’ll bow back. And marvel that a gaijin can drive.

 

ETA – I love that the wordpress spellchecker recognises asshole as a word, but not internet. Or wordpress.

 

Edited again to remove extraneous “ass” from line above. Apologies.

Things That Keep Me Sane II

 

I’ve been here 8 months now. Out in the freakin inaka (countryside). Things get boring. I have to work to keep myself entertained. 

 

More things that keep my mind from turning to mud. Or at least slow the process. 

 

1. Amazon.jp.

It’s just excellent. Thousands and thousands of books, dvds, everything. I’ve bought a hair dryer, a straightener and many many books so far. Part of the site is in English, but it’s really just for English language books. For other stuff I put it through google translator. Sometimes the translations are a bit Engrish, but whatever. Free delivery on purchases over 1500 yen and they do cash on delivery. 

 

2. Internet piracy.

You know that anti-piracy ad they have at the start of dvds? “You wouldn’t steal a handbag… You wouldn’t steal a car…”

Sorry to Paramount and the like, but if I could make an exact copy of someones car by electronic means FOR FREE then yeah, I would. And fupp off with your handbag stealing talk. Most people don’t snatch bags from women’s shoulders. But women have bought literally millions of counterfeit handbags. Which is much more similar to internet piracy than actual mugging. So get lost. 

I watch tv shows online. If the stupid networks would just allow people from abroad to watch their shows on their own websites then I wouldn’t do it. They’d even get more money from advertisers (of products sold worldwide, obviously). But when I see an ad for your show telling me I can watch it for free on your site, and then I go there and I’m told that it’s unavailable in my region then SCREW YOU. I’m straight over to surfthechannel. And I don’t even feel bad about it.

Stupid Japan

 

I’m sure this happens in other countries, but gah!

 

Who the crap makes a ketchup bottle so flimsy that just holding the bottle makes ketchup fly out and spatter all over my kitchen and feet? God dammit!

 

I just spent the last ten minutes cleaning up the murder scene before I realised that I should have taken a picture for the blog. Then I actually contemplated re-spilling the ketchup. Man, I’m bored. 

 

So instead, here’s a picture of the equally-flimsy mayo bottle. 

 

 

Looks innocuous right? Hang on, I’ll just try to pick it up…. 

The pathetic thing just collapses in on itself.

 

Upside – portions of the kitchen floor are now clean. Even if they do smell a bit like ketchup.

Japanese Kids Wear The Darndest Things

 

Another day, another hilarious item of clothing.

Today it was a ten year old girl wearing a hooded sweater.
The writing?

MATE EVERYTHING.

IN NIGHTS.

 

Sometimes it’s hard to keep from cracking up. I wish I could take pictures, but it would just be too weird.

One of these days I’ll have to set up a hidden camera.

Firing A Class

 

As well as teaching a rake of little kids, I also have 8 Junior High School classes. In Japan, Junior High School lasts for three years and is the equivalent of 7th/8th/9th grade. 

 

I’ve already mentioned that there’s another foreign teacher in the school. He’s Australian and pushing 50. He’s also a gym teacher in a high school so he’s pretty fit and energetic. However, he seems to have a major discipline problem. As in, he just can’t do it.

 

Every two months we switch over the elementary classes so that I take his timetable and he takes mine. For the first two or three weeks after the switch I deal with chaos. The kids just aren’t used to not being able to run around screaming all the time, hitting each other and hitting the teacher. I am NOT OK with being hit. No matter how hilarious it is to the kindergarteners. So, I have to lay the smack down for two weeks and teach the little bastards some respect.

 

In Japan, all kids are taught to respect their teachers. A lot. But, we’re not real people. We’re foreigners. So the rules are different. They think we’re clowns. So the respect needs to be earned. I try my best. 

 

Junior High School classes don’t change. We’re supposed to keep on the same classes for a whole year. However, in the last 7 months, I’ve been asked by the other teacher (let’s call him Bruce from now on, he’s going to crop up in a few posts) to switch classes twice. Once I traded a lovely class of 2nd year girls for a class of 1st year boys. They are rowdy as hell. Rowdy I can deal with.

 

The other time I got a class of 10 2nd year boys (and three girls). Some of the boys are just horrid. They are somehow silent and obnoxious at the same time. Sullen and mean. They refuse to do any work at all. As in, I give them a wordsearch and they draw penises on it. They sent emails on their phones. They answer calls. They refuse to look at me. 

 

Now, I’m no fool. I know that no 14 year old boy wants to be at an after-school English class til 10pm on a Thursday night. But, there are a few good kids in the class. (My god, those poor long-suffering girls.) Their parents are paying money for their kids to learn English. It’s just not fair. So, I accept that there’s going to be a certain amount of not-working in the class but I do expect it to not totally ruin the learning for everyone. 

 

If a phone rings, I expect a “May I go to the toilet” and for the kid to leave the room to answer the phone. I don’t give a crap how long he’s gone for so long as we’re not all sitting listening to his conversation. If I give a worksheet, I expect them to at least make a decent attempt at pretending to do it. Copy off the kid next to you. Circle a few random letter combinations in the wordsearch. I allow quiet chatting while doing worksheets. I don’t collect them for correction at the end of class (I correct them during class so they go home with a sheet of good English). Just pretend to work and I’ll leave you alone and concentrate on the kids who actually are working!

 

Ugh. 

 

So anyway, a few weeks ago I came to the end of my rope. After 40 minutes of utter frustration, I snapped. I told them I didn’t want to teach them any more. That they were too bad and rude. That from now on, the owner of the school would teach them. That put The Fear into the good kids. After all, she knows their parents. She can speak Japanese. Trouble ahead! I told them that there was 20 minutes left in the class. We have games. We have playing cards. We also have worksheets. I threw a stack of worksheets on the floor. They sat there uncomfortably. Then they all took a worksheet. 

 

And started drawing penises on them. 

 

At the end of the class I asked them all to write their names on their sheets and give them back to me. Something I’d never done before. The best of the bad kids quickly started erasing the penises and so on. The bad bad kids just left them. 

 

I told the owner of the school that I was firing them. She wasn’t that surprised that they were bad, but she was horrified when I told her just how bad they were. She promised to take the class the next week and give them a bollocking. 

 

The next week, I skipped the class. The owner of the school never showed up. It was left to the poor Japanese grammar lady to bollock the kids. God dammit. They don’t respect her either. 

 

Anyway, the good kids apologised, the bad kids ignored me and I went back to teaching the class. What the hell was I supposed to do? I have another class right after that one so I can’t exactly go home and leave poor Japanese lady with two classes to teach every week. 

 

I’ve been waiting for… oh…. six weeks to talk to the owner of the school about this (and a million other issues). 

 

Rant actually over this time.

Teaching in Japan – Frustrations

 

Recently I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated with work. For anyone reading this for the first time, I teach kids from the ages of 2 to 15 (sometimes up to 18) in after-school English classes. The classes are held in a small private school. Two classrooms, two foreign conversation teachers, a Japanese grammar teacher, a Filipina helper and a Japanese office lady. The owner/”director” of the school makes an occasional appearance for a few minutes.

 

There are some problems. Firstly, there are just too many kids in each class. Some classes have twelve 7-year-olds. Now, in comparison to regular school class sizes, this is tiny, but for me, it’s too many. Mostly because I just don’t have the language skills to control them. I mean, if one of the kids says something horrible to another, and then gets pummelled, the pummeller gets in trouble and the pummellee gets an apology. It’s just not right. I spend so much of my time breaking up fights and trying to get the kids to concentrate that it’s exhausting. In a normal classroom, they’d be sitting at desks. I’d have a desk. In my school though, we’re all sitting on the floor. The kids are right up next to each other. Punching is just too easy.

 

The second major problem is mixed levels in the same class. One class has a couple of kindergarteners in with a bunch of 8-year-olds and one sharp as a tack 10-year-old. The 10-year-old is bored out of his mind, the kindergarteners don’t learn a thing and the 8-year-olds don’t learn much because whenever they don’t know the answer, they look to the older kid and he whispers the answer. It’s all kind of pointless. 

 

Lastly, the level that’s being expected is too high. The crunch came when I was trying to teach the kids the phrase “any”. As in, “is there any soda/are there any sandwiches”. We were playing go fish. The kids had to use the phrase “Do you have any fives”. They’re playing in teams, three 10-year-olds to a team. It’s the girls’ team’s turn. One says “Do you have any….. go?” Go is Japanese for five. Seriously. I’m trying to teach the particulars of some/any and they can’t count to ten. After having gone to classes at this school for seven years. Their parents have spent a million yen on classes. Go convert that into your own currency and marvel. I’m spending my days drilling verbs like repair, shovel, type and fold when they don’t know verbs like read, write, say and do. It’s infuriating!

 

Rant over.