高校 School

I teach at a large senior high school of around 1000 students aged from 16 to 18. It is my only school. If ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) teach at Elementary schools or Junior High schools they can work at up to thirteen or fourteen different schools…

The school building was built around fifty years ago and is surprisingly ‘un-modern’. All the teachers use chalk on blackboards in the staffroom and the classrooms. Schools in England use whiteboards and marker pens and probably have interactive whiteboards. There is a computer lab upstairs and the computers must be 15 years old. Being Japan, all the doors slide open sideways. I asked if there was a paper cutter and was taken into the photocopying room where the paper cutter is this enormous electric machine with a red laser light and three safety catches. Seeing the board after a Maths or Chemistry class- Japanese characters mixed with algebra- is enough to boggle the mind.

Quite a few corridors around the school are lined with sinks. At lunchtime everyone cleans their teeth. After lunch the children all clean the school. The discipline is astonishing. They all sweetly move the desks, sweep the floors and even do the weeding in the courtyard garden. I help wax the floor, every day, with the girls on our knees drawing pictures with the wax on the wooden floor and rubbing it in with incredibly dirty and hairy once-white cloths. At first the discipline frightened me but on a further look you can see that the boys sweep the floor but their methods don’t imply that they’ve decided upon a designated place to move the dust and paper clips and hair to so they just move them about the room. What amazed me is that they don’t rotate jobs. The kids who get given the toilet to clean, really do it every day. It’s not important to them to be ‘fair’ and swap it around. They don’t just say, ‘look I’ve been cleaning the toilet for 6 months now, can’t I pot some flowers?’

I don’t wear a suit to work, but the Japanese way is very conservative. Since showing your tummy or skin is taboo people wear white tops or t-shirts underneath their shirts. When I arrived it was over 80 percent humidity and about 35 degrees and I was essentially wearing a vest, which contributed to my constant drowsiness.

No one understands British English any more. We are a forgotten breed. Even the phonetics in the text books force me to adopt American pronunciation. I have to spell everything flavor, color. I make some question about the dustbin. “Dustbin?” They look confused, eyebrow raised. Okay, “trash can”. I ask if we must wear smart clothes and they wonder what I am talking about. Apart from feelings of pride the more practical problems are that I don’t know all the words. Did you know that a duvet was a comforter and pavement the road?

Dankun

This is a school tradition that’s been running (no pun intended) since my supervisor went to this school. The whole entire school emerged on the outdoor area, which isn’t grass but sandy grit. No one warned me to bring my trainers etc. so I sat under a tree in the shade. It was madness: an army warm-up in perfect unison to music box music, commanded by a P.E. Teacher with a whistle shouting over a megaphone. They all ran- teachers, headmaster, boys and girls- four laps of the pitch. Someone fainted in the heat and was carried off in a linen stretcher.

A month later Dankun came round again. This time I did it. Even though it began to pour with rain, everyone emerged onto the school ground and we performed the elaborate exercises in the grey rain shower. Then I ran, following moving white hats and black hair, with the rain pouring down and the sand becoming wetter. The third years will go to university soon and they threw their hats into the air with pride.

宴会 Enkai

The teachers seem to have a lot of Enkais (a dinner or work party). For my welcome party the English department went to a traditional restaurant where the party sits in a room closed off by paper walls. Everyone says ‘Itadakimasu’ before you eat and ‘Cheers’ is ‘Kampai’! The food arrived on tiny ceramic dishes and we ate through twenty miniature courses- sashimi, fried pork sticks, grilled fish in a sticky glaze, vegetable and langoustine tempura with daigakon (radish- the largest radishes in the world are grown on Sakurajima volcano), miso soup, then finally a bowl of rice and finished with sushi. The only thing I couldn’t eat was a little pot with something inside that looked exactly like a crème caramel pudding, but was really (really) salty. I didn’t get my camera out until the second enkai, which half the school attended, and which was much healthier along the lines of giant orange beady salmon fish eggs, tofu and grilled whole fish with a bitter stomach. Everyone gets wonderfully drunk on shochu (a liqueur made from sweet potato) and plum wine.

School Life

I feel sorry for the students. The high school is very academic and they work too hard. They come to school at 7:30 in the morning and often leave at 7:00 at night as they have club activities up until evening time and meetings with teachers. They fall asleep in class and in the corridors, and it’s not from staying up late playing on PlayStations. After spending up to 12 hours a day at school they still go home and do their homework. It makes me feel lazy with my 4 minute cycle ride to school for 9:00 and leaving again at 4.45 whilst everyone carries on…so far I have worked on three weekends, Cultural festival, Sports Day and Speech Contest.

The Cultural Festival

September 11th

It must have been the hottest day since I arrived. The opening ceremony of the school festival took part in the hall. An ice block was brought in and a fan blew the cool air over a few lucky ones. Everyone else dabbed their faces with flannels bedecked with Disney characters. The stage performances began. There were hip-hop dancers and the school brass band and even a class play of High School Musical. After every third performance all the curtains were opened above the balcony by students and everyone flooded outside for five minutes before returning to their seats again to resume the stage acts.

The day provided the chance for the various club activities to show-off what they have been practising. I had a ticket in the mid-morning for the tea ceremony club. I could hardly believe they were teenagers. I tried to imagine getting any group of British teenagers to take half an hour delicately serving tea or joining a flower arranging club. I struggled. The day before I had helped with the flower arranging; and by ‘help’ I mean I stood at the side and tried not to touch anything.

Every class had a display, like mosaic art or photography or science. The best by far was the Ghost House. I was genuinely scared as hands came though the black curtain and masked children jumped out to frighten victims. In another class, a video of toned down Dirty Sanchez-style stunts from a more rebellious class also brought relief.

Sports Day

September 18th

Sports Day at this Senior High School was probably one of the most insanely impressive things I’ve ever seen. The day started with an impeccably timed procession, involving taiko drumming, with parents watching from all sides of the sports ground. After which, students separated to stand with their different year groups, each with a large painting that represented their group, as nervous energy and excitement built up.

Considering the formality of how the day was conducted, I was surprised by the number of lighthearted events that took place. After the usual running events, they did the caterpillar relay, where, after each lap, more and more student’s legs are tied together and they have to run attached. I suppose in England they’d consider this a health and safety breakdown. They also did group skipping and ran in costume and the teachers had to run in teams and grab this hoop thing.

The day came to a close with traditional folk dances which were possibly more immaculately synchronized than anything in the West End. It occurred to me how exceptional it was to see this cultural display, which invoked this kind of emotional response from onlookers and performers. The effort and energy was so immense that the leader of the group broke down in tears afterwards.

Speech Contest

October 2nd

I’ve never actually coached someone to achieve something before in quite this way. Ikeda came to me with her speech and was determined to perfect it in time for the contest on Saturday. The first time she performed was really quite dire. Incredibly flat, no intonation, eyes fixed to the sheet, head bobbing up and down like a dashboard puppy with the softest spoken voice …

We worked on it for maybe two hours a day for an entire week and a half. I marked every place in the speech where she had to stress. She then read the speech robotically with extra loud effort and pressure on certain points. She learnt to pronounce ‘the’, get the ‘o’ in ‘notice’ and again in ‘front’. I taught her that small words like conjunctions are pronounced more lazily than bigger words. She approached it earnestly. She stopped nodding, ironed out her nervous hand gestures and had difficulty expressing the feeling and meaning of the words in her voice. She progressed by including firm, solid hand actions. She memorized every action and produced it again the next time.

In true Japan-style the event opened punctually with a ceremony. The day presented an opportunity to see the array of amazing school uniforms all lined up. A boy and a girl from one school were matching with checkered green trousers and skirt. Another had bright pink woolly vest tops (boys and girls) others had navy neck ties and pleated skirts.

As it turned out, Ikeda was in competition with girls who’d spent a summer or two abroad and come back in possession of American twangs, one girl with a strange hybrid Australian-British accent. Actually it was very interesting to observe the difference between those students and the ones who’d learnt only in Japan. They’d learnt so much more from that month away than language. Their manners and expressions were clearly so different from the other students. They were suddenly loud and expressive, made eye contact, made opinionated comments and smiled boldly.

Ikeda remembered all her words, smiled, spoke well and acted convincingly. She didn’t win. In the end she was really just too cute to make a serious speech, but everyone enjoyed it.

Baseball

I went to watch a baseball match that the students played. It was part of a tournament between the schools in Kagoshima prefecture, and it was my first ever time to see baseball live! We sat in the stadium sipping green tea whilst the students put in their best effort. It was an exciting game, a close match and our team eventually lost in the last minute by one point. The group of female teachers went for a buffet lunch in a hotel- grilled fish, tempura, soup, Chinese noodles, breaded langoustines…Overall- not a bad day of work.

In the Classroom

I will prepare you, reader, for a series of paragraphs that may not be rosy.

My supervisor asked me one day, “Er, Fiona, can you go in next period and teach a lesson on relative pronouns?”…. I don’t have a grammar book or any resources other than a 7th Edition JET guide to team-teaching fun communication games, entitled, ‘Team-taught Pizza’.

The idea of JET is team-teaching. One teacher didn’t seem to want to discuss the lesson beforehand. He said, “We will be doing past tense”.
Ok, “which past tense?”
“Past tense”.
Hum. I made a warmer activity. Then in the lesson I did the warmer that I had prepared.
Afterwards the teacher said, “Now do your role-play activity”.
I said, “that was my role-play activity”.
“Ok. Now explain past tense to students”.

Participation on the students’ part didn’t seem to have improved. I wrote on the board, “I went to school yesterday”. “What tense is this?” Blank faces. “Is it past, present or future?”. Blank faces. I underlined the word ‘yesterday’ and chose an individual student who just stared at his desk as if I hadn’t spoken. Well, “Is it about tomorrow, today or yesterday?”. Still no response. I picked a different student. Again, no response. The teacher didn’t react.

Teaching English in Japan is difficult. Japanese students are shy, competitive with each other and embarrassed to make a mistake. They don’t answer questions verbally and if they do any kind of pair activity they just speak Japanese. They speak to each other so quietly, that if it wasn’t for their lips moving, I wouldn’t know communication was happening.

I recalled the summer school experiences I’ve had. There are the 13 year old Russian girls wearing the hot-pants and the massive high heals; the French kids who all congregate behind the bike sheds to smoke and the German and Saudi kids who sit next to their teachers at lunchtime and chat to them like they’re new mates. Looking around the room it occurred to me that the mood somehow just lacked liveliness. Eyes at desks, cheeks flushed and they’re willing you to go away, for the room to swallow them up or for a meteorite to hit rather than make any kind of eye contact with you.

Hmm. How to create an interactive, communicative, classroom environment? The style of learning here is different. Everything has an exact answer which can be learnt. Never, “What do you think about…” or “What is the speaker’s opinion…” or anything that must be conjectured. English worksheets are comprised mostly of translations.

On top of this, the students are so exhausted that encouraging them to use their imaginations is no picnic. In one class they learnt some terminology about laws and then they were governors and could create any law they wanted. After ten minutes no one had even thought of an idea in Japanese let alone tried to write it in English and in the end they wrote the sentences on the board because they didn't want to read them and most of them wrote the same answer, ‘it is illegal to do homework’. At least they used the target expression…

The boys and girls don’t interact. I only realized during the second lesson when they had to go about the room asking each other questions- the boys and girls avoid each other like a bad smell; or it’s so normal to not speak to a member of the opposite sex that they don’t consider it. After speaking to an English friend who lived in Tokyo, this apparently isn’t uncommon. At university he asked his friend one day if he would ask this girl out. He said, “Alex, look. I’ve never spoken to a girl in my life before”.

Japanese is simple where our language is complicated and complicated where our language is simple. I can see how the students struggle. English spelling is haywire; the pronunciation quite often makes no sense; the sentence structure is the opposite, subject verb object rather than subject object verb. The students have no idea when to use articles or make words plural or use infinitives or gerunds and often the teachers don’t know either. I’m not invited to classes often and so it’s difficult to know how to start.

Reading the students' short compositions can be enlightening. Translations of Japanese proverbs and metaphors are woven into the commonplace. The style is often elevated in comparison to things that would normally be said in English. They speak about wisdom, which path to follow and make romanticised analogies. In their write-ups of school events or competitions they thank their teachers for their wisdom and courage and for helping them accomplish their baseball goals.

Out of the Classroom

Experiences with the students outside of class involve effusions of giggles followed by "kawaiiii"(cute). The role-play like interaction is always the same. I ask something like, “What did you do yesterday?” The response is, with hand over mouth, to giggle and look at their friends. All whisper. All giggle. Make no eye contact with me, “ehh??” They stand still for about two minutes while you repeat the question. Eventually “homework” emerges, after confirmation from friends first that it’s absolutely and definitely without a doubt the correct response and then they run away. When I try to speak Japanese they get so overexcited. I begin to wonder whether they think I am not a foreigner but a different species entirely. I'm E.T but without the little boy showing me where to go.

Sometimes it’s lovely though. I’m leaving the school and tons of students shout ‘bye bye, bye bye’. Sometimes they get excited to speak so me, ‘Halllo! How are you? We are fine' or chorus 'so so so so. You are very cute'.
'O no', I reply, 'You are cuter than me'….

English Club

Just over a month ago I started ESS (English Speaking Society). The club was advertised to 600 students, though not advertised well. A poster was put on the board of each class, and in the first class there were 5 students. The class went well, the students were responsive and after getting over the terror seemed to surprise themselves at how much they understood. But the next week the boy was apparently so shocked by being the only boy, that he said he couldn’t come any more. So then there were 4.

After spending the whole entire morning last Monday preparing a class on articles that I hoped would be educational and fun, involving writing limericks, after twenty minutes nobody showed up and I trailed saddened back to the staffroom. But then two students found me and said they were sorry, mumbled some excuse in Japanese and asked if they could still have English club. It was actually very fun and saved me from going home and crying about how unfulfilling my job was. At the end they said in perfect unison, ‘Fiona, do you want to go to the cinema with us to see the new Harry Potter film?' Success!

Staff

I like the teachers I work with and they have a good sense of humour. I went for lunch with one teacher in the school canteen. It was cold so I commented ‘samui desu さむいです’. She said- you’re cold because you’re not wearing much. There were some male teachers present wearing nothing warmer than their shirts. She pointed at one of them and said, ‘he’s ok because he has a lot of fat’. The man overheard and chuckled.

The First Week

So, it’s the first day at work. I want to make some lesson plans. I go to the computer, which surprisingly hasn’t been replaced since the 80s, and find that all the buttons are in Japanese. All the information on Word Processor is in Japanese. I don’t want to disturb anyone. Everyone looks busy. I close my eyes and try and remember the position of all the buttons on WORD on my pc. I’m finally able to change the keyboard into English, the rest is still guesswork.

Next, finding a phone. Everyone had a phone and it seemed important to get one as soon as possible. In the phone shop, which was enormous, everything was of course written in Japanese, all the prices, plan details and promotions. Everything you wish to buy in Japan comes in every colour you knew existed. My supervisor accompanied me. I now had the added pressure of which phone to get, how much money to spend and how to cause her the least inconvenience. As it turned out, she knew practically nothing about phone shopping. Asking “how much is this one?” turned into a shop assistant coming over, half an hour of quiet tooing and frooing in Japanese and the expectation that I would purchase it. "Which is the cheapest one?" didn’t seem to help either; the choice seemed barely narrowed down. I was simply bewildered. They didn’t seem to give me any information that illuminated the task in any way. Every time I found one that I could envisage owning, it was too expensive. Eventually I found one that I liked, the price was suitable. It was even waterproof, which for me is a creditable bonus feature. It was out of stock. I decided to leave the shop.

Opening a bank account was not much of an easier task; I had to write my address in Chinese characters, which at least created some amusement for my supervisor. We had to go away and come back when my alien registration card had arrived. When I finally received my paying-in book for Kagoshima Bank it had The Moomins on it, which was cheery.

As it got to about Wednesday at work I started to get the feeling there was a strange aura about the dustbin. When applying for my alien registration card at City Hall Harada Sensei picked me up a booklet on recycling. Did this confirm my suspicions? On the Friday my supervisor made me go through the bin so I could pick out all of my rubbish- a cold coffee container, a sushi wrapper, some tissues. She explained everyone takes their rubbish home with them and only school rubbish such as rough paper or broken paper clips can be put in the bins at work.


The Introduction Class

I brought a poster or ‘Life Map’ with me to Japan. It was getting a little moth-eaten. I talked to Tomoko sensei, another English teacher at work, and we thought about laminating it. Being rather large, it required two sheets of laminator plastic. Something went wrong and it came out the other end like I’d been practicing hair crimping in the 90s. So we spent the next hour and a half in the home economics room ironing it out. Actually it turned out to be quite a good opportunity for a chat.

Going into class I was surprisingly un-nervous. This was the only familiar part so far. I gave my presentation using the newly laminated and ironed-out life-map and handed out some pictures. You never quite predict the things that people will be excited about and the things that they won’t. The picture I randomly took of Kings Cross station turned into the highlight piece as whispers of Harry Potter whizzed around the room.

At the end of the class the students had time to ask me questions. After being too shy to answer any of my questions during the presentation- like rabbits in the headlights- the few students who volunteered asked, “Do you have a Boyfriend?”, “Do you like Mr Fukudome?” (who was standing right there) and “If Mr Negama was an animal, what animal would he be?” I was impressed by the correct use of a conditional sentence. I knew of course he would be a hedgehog. But the student answered, “I think a cat”. Mr Negama gave him a pretend swipe across the head.

In the first week I somehow ate in the same Indian restaurant twice, which, in a bemusing way, is called 'Milan'. Once to meet the PA (Prefecture Advisor) in Kagoshima for the JET Programme and the next time with some other ALTs and a few of their Japanese friends. One girl taught us some Japanese onomatopoeia. ‘PECA PECA’ is ‘I’m hungry’, and ‘PAM PAM’ is ‘I’m full’.

On the Thursday I began Japanese class. When I arrived at the Cultural Centre I saw some other people from the JET programme and was a bit taken aback. The man spoke loads of Japanese and everyone started doing things. I was paired with a Japanese volunteer helper who didn’t have a word of English. We managed to work out our names and where we were from. Then everyone started to perform what they’d been asked to one at a time. It was horrible. I must have been pink. Everyone was staring.

Other JETs seem to have wanted to come to Japan their whole lives. They have some comprehension of Japanese or some strong connection, they lived here once when they were 6, or their parents lived here, or they studied Japanese in college, or they’ve always been an anime fanatic and are going to learn kendo. There’s a guy who lives below me from New Jersey, who although has never left the United States, has been planning to come for about 5 or 6 years. I think I need to come up with a better reason. I will say I want to learn taiko- the Japanese drum and how to deliver tea ceremonies.

Saturday was the first time I began to feel comfortable. I also met Sherri. Sherri was a JET 17 years ago. She arrived when she was 23 and stayed two years. When she went back to America her boyfriend here in Kagoshima told her he was in love with her and she came back and has been here ever since. They have two very cute children. Matt and I met Sherri because she saw an advert that Matt posted about needing a bed on the JET webpage. Sherri saw it and offered her van. We got chatting and I said I was looking for a bike. They knew where a cheap complex was, they were going to the hyaku (100) yen store anyway. I bought a purple bicycle with a basket for only £50. We wandered up to the pet shop with the children. There I saw a guinea pig with no fur and contemplated buying a turtle. I bought a miniature pot plant instead.




On the Sunday I decided to visit Sakurajima volcano since it had been eyeing me up all week. Matt and our bikes came too. As soon as we were on the ferry it started throwing ash and raining. Despite the rain, it was beautiful- palm trees along the side of the road, the sea on the right, this green volcano protruding from the earth on the left. I grasped a real sense of where I was living as we relaxed in an outdoor onsen (natural hot-spring) by the sea. Matt pointed out, “Not everyone has a volcano in their back yard”. And then I felt lucky.