Communication Breakbown

Something to amuse you as you hear how fully incompetent I am at communicating in my own country. I am bowing right, left and centre, then being embarrased that I've just bowed so bowing more in apology/embarrassment, my head nodding up and down like one of those annoying dogs that sit on the car dashboard...it's starting to look like I'm half way between having a seizure and starting a break dance or something as my bows get continuouly deeper and force my nose closer to the floor...I might learn break dancing so that I can just start styling it out into that - I think that would look more natural!

I have just come back from Vienna on holiday (I used to live in Vienna, it's amazing) - I went and asked a lady in the airport which U-Bahn line my desti-station (I've just made that word - why don't we have that word?) was on, in German - it was no problem when I prepared myself slightly, she answered, but I, unfortunately hadn't prepared myself to respond, and even the simplest "Danke" seemed to escape me, and I opted for athe next best thing: a big bow and an "arigatou gozaimasu" in the middle of Schwechat airport in Vienna...how was I supposed to explain that? "Oh sorry, that was Japanese, I'm not Japanese though, obviously, but I used to live in Japan, but you can hear I'm also not Austrian, I'm British, but I'm here on holiday and I can speak German because I used to live here and studied it at uni"...then how would she respond having just felt that she'd watched an episode of "This Is Your Life with sushi-less" and we'd both missed our trains. So, instead, I sort of yelped and leapt back at the same time and ran to the ticket machine, leaving a very confused Austrian in my still semi-bowing shadow...NOT GOOD.

I've become so used to getting it wrong and embarrassing myself, my new tactic is to just say nothing in reply to people, which is incredibly rude, but at least it saves me looking like I'm one of those chronically shy people that is on their first day out of the house in two years. It's so weird, because I seem almost fine when I'm with my mates, but the second I'm amongst actual general public, who have no idea that I've just been living in Japan for two years, I start getting everything wrong and looking like a crazy person!! Typical! One thing that I haven't got out of the habit of, even with my friends, is gesturing everything...this is not from my experience of talking in Japanese in Japan, but of speaking English to a bunch of kids who understood very little of what I said, meaning that I got into the habit (which I apparently can't shake) of gesturing everything possible, which means doing a little pencil gesture when I say "write", making a little book with my hands when I say "book" or "read" and pointing at people when I say "you". This means that I am treating my fully native English speaking 2o-something friends, as if they are 5-year-old Japanese children with no grasp of the English language. One such gesture is that every time I say "me" or "I", I point at myself....unfortunately in Japan you point at your nose not your chest when you say "watashi" (true story), so I keep pointing at my nose at the dinner table...beautiful. I'm also counting with my fingers in the Japanese way, which is getting a bit ridiculous now and getting many strange stares. You should be able to see them below: this is how a Japanese person gestures when you counting, and this is now how I now gesture when I count...to people who don't need a gesture as they fully understand the words 1-10 of course. My worst gesture faux-pas so far was yesterday, when I shook my finger (wagged it, you know, like a patronising head teacher) at the girl in the chippy (fish and chip shop) when she asked me if I wanted salt and vinegar on my chips. She looked horrified, which I can understand - it was very sort of..."no little girl, of COURSE I don't want salt and vinegar." Must think harder next time...that or tie my hands behind my back when outside of the house.

Of course, I wish I could say that my problems here in the UK stem from the fact that I am an example of perfection in my communication style in Japan...not so. I recall not long from the end of my stay in Japan that in ONE DAY I managed to not contradict a man when he said his granddaughter was a bit slow, and instead agree, fall asleep in the waiting room at the dentist's, wear my special dentist surgery's slipper onto the MINISCULE piece of carpet situtated at the bit where you put your feet when you sit on the leany-backy-dentisty chair, put there surely only to catch out the gaijin, over-confident in outdoor shoe-indoor shoe-slipper-toilet slipper-bare foot CHAOS that is Japan's complicated shoe system...why that TINY piece of carpet just there that you had to be bare foot on...WHY?? And also I was in the school's announcement system room and managed to play some music on the loud broadcast outside the school when I thought it was only playing in the little room I was in...bit of the Norwegian Eurovision entry for the kids outside on the PE field. That was all in one day too!

So, what I am telling you is that I left Europe 2 years ago a fully competent member of British society and, I think, Austrian society, to being some kind of half-way-house, not fully competent anywhere and not to be trusted alone in public at any time...I might get myself a sign to go round my neck saying "WARNING: just been living in a strange country, high risk of social awkwardness and head nodding," or maybe I'll just give in and buy myself a Dunce's hat...embrace my new-found incompetence!

Random Event Of They Day 9

I was waiting in the photo printing shop, whilst the photo lady was behind a screen taking photos of someone...photo photo photo. There was a lot of "kawaiii" (cute) being screeched by her and another woman with no response, so I was assuming that it was a baby or a shy toddler being photographed. Ten minutes later and what walks out? A woman holding a DOG dressed in a wedding dress! Dressing up your pets is fairly popular in Japan and there are lots of shops dedicated to costumes and dog spas etc. (believe me the dog was dressed better than the woman). She sat down on the seat next to me (the woman, not the dog) and set about changing her out of the wedding dress into her normal clothes and putting the ribbons on her ears into a box full to the brim with doggy accessories, before replacing them with slightly less fancy ribbons (just the everyday ribbon as opposed to the bridal one)...Craziness!

The Miyagi Earthquake

I thought I had better post something about this. Obviously I don't need to tell you that a massive earthquake occurred off the coast of north east Japan on Friday afternoon. It has just been upgraded to a magnitude of 9.0, making it one of the five biggest earthquakes in recorded world history. Bottom line from my point of view is that I'm ok, and am currently just sitting at home, thinking of the poor people in the devastated area in the North of Japan and watching (but not really understanding) the news about the nuclear plant in Fukushima which is currently having various issues.

Anyway, I'll tell you how it's all played out in my area, although it is not one of the worstly hit at all. For info, if you look at a map of Japan, I'm in Gunma prefecture, right on the tip bit nearest to Tokyo. At about quarter to 3 on Friday, tremors began. Earthquakes are very common in Japan and it only took a few weeks of living here to get used to quick jolts beneath my feet. The longer ones are always slightly scarier for me, but, by and large, you just learn to just wait for it to finish and to carry on with what you were doing. Friday's one was a lot different. After 20 seconds or so, the ground was still shaking and it just felt like it was growing and growing. I was in the staff room at my juniour high school, with about 15 other members of staff. Everybody started looking at eachother in a sort of a "is this a really big one then? Should we be doing something?" way. I am so relieved that I was with other people...basically, I just copied everyone, so I put out my hands and held my computer screen in place. Some of the teachers went and opened the windows (I'm not actually sure what that's for, something to do with less chance of them breaking?) and then the vibrations got much bigger, anything that was hanging began swinging back and forth and then, all of the computers and lights went off. Previously to that, a few teachers had been nervously saying "should we get under our desks?" but the lights going out made it clear that that was what we should do, so we all got down and sat under our desks, while the shaking continued. A few things crashed and banged around me, but it was fairly clear that is wasn't the building and was just fittings or other objects. The only person not under his desk was the headteacher, who walked down the staffroom to hold up the massive new free-standing air-conditioner thing they've just brought. I watched his funny trainers going past and just thought he was like Superman or something. I was so scared! I can't believe he was so so concerned about the air-conditioner!! I think the earthquake might have lasted about 3 minutes from the first time we could feel a tremor to it stopping. It was really unnerving and it felt like it was shaking so much...I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been nearer the epicentre. It must have been horrendous.

On emerging, everyone looked worried but calm. We all set about clearing up broken glasses and picking up fallen chairs and books etc. Some of the brave staff went around and checked all the rooms for damage and the other staff - there was next to no damage and everyone was fine. Luckily for me, the children had already all gone home, because it had been the graduation ceremony that day and so they all went home early. I was in the best place...the thought of being on my own, or on a train full of strangers, or, as I would have been on any other weekday this month or last month, in a room full of primary school children that I am responsible for, and, even worse, a room without desks. Having said that, I have since spoken to two friends, one who was teacing in primary school and one who was in nursery school, and they also noted the lack of panic. I have been INCREDIBLY impressed with the reaction of the people here. No hysteria, no panic. Even talking to friends in worse affected areas or watching the pictures on TV of the devastated towns, the reaction still seems relatively calm. A true testament to the lack of selfishness amongst Japanese people and putting what is best for the wider community first. Anyway, I was truly in the best place. Well, a better place would have been further south in Japan, or indeed, not in Japan, but, you know what I mean.

In the staff room, somebody managed to access the internet on their mobile and found out that the epicentre was in Miyagi and that is was a "7" and that we had felt it as a "weak 5." I thought they were talking about the richter scale, but, it turns out that there is a different scale in Japan based on shakiness (?) instead of energy, 7 being the top. Weak 5 is basically still a lot but unlikely to knock down buildings. Most of Tokyo felt a strong 5 apparently. The fact that it was in Miyagi (two prefectures over from me and about 200km away as a teacher told me) made me very worried about what the damage might be there, but, I was slightly relieved at the same time that it hadn't had its epicentre in Tokyo. Everyone in the staff room speculated for a while about whether there would be big aftershocks and, sure enough, a couple of minutes later they started. Two of them sent us under the desks again...actually, one of them sent us all under our desks and the other one sent a few of the wusses under their desks - I am a wuss. The atmosphere in the staffroom remained calm, humour was still present. One teacher teased me for getting under my desk the third time and the school secretary got word from her husband that he was ok and announced "he's ok...unfortunately." I'm not sure how different nations react to things, but the continuted nervous humour and the reluctancy to panic and assume straight away that the earthquake was going to be big when we first felt shaking, or that it was likely to have been a tragedy in the area that it hit before we knew anything, reminded me somewhat of a British reaction to big events...maybe all countries react like that, but I'm not sure. However, I'm sure the UK would have seen much more hysteria once it became clear just how dramatic the effects were in reality, but Japan really doesn't seem to have. For the next hour and half, the mainline phone was off and on, but we had no power, water, or mobile coverage. The headteacher, Clark Kent, told us to go home and check our homes etc. I didn't really want to go and be alone, because the aftershocks were still rumbling away and I knew that I would literally have no information at home. However, as the last few people were leaving, I went too. I walked my bike back, just to be on the safe side, as the ground was a bit shakey and the traffic lights weren't working. There were no signs of damage in the town, except for a broken plaque to a park and some fallen roof tiles.

I was a little bit scared to open my flat's door, but, I had to let out a laugh as I did, to find two eggs had broken on the floor. If that's the worst that's happened I thought! I'd bought about 10 eggs the other day for pancake day as it was all I could find and was worried about using them that night as they'd officially gone off on Thursday, so that was that decision made for me! The only other damage was a broken mug which had jumped into the bath, as I'd left it on the side after my naughty breakfast bathtime coffee...silly Mark. Also, my globe had committed suicide from off of the top of my TV and into my kotatsu. Apart from that, it was mostly just food that had been flung about a bit and the fridge that had leapt forward a tad and sent the blender down the back of it. It's really amazing how strong things are!

Anyway, I still had NO IDEA how large the earthquake had actually been up in Miyagi. My flat was without phone, electricity, water or gas. I just sort of sat for a couple of hours to ride out the aftershocks and tried not to panic (not easy...I had no idea how to tell what was going to be a big one, and couldn't decide if it was safer to get under my kotatsu if a big one came or to get out of the building.) Just on the off-chance that somebody saw something about it on international news, I updated my Facebook status from my phone and emailed my parents...thank God I did! I still hadn't imagined that it would make worldwide headlines. Gas came back on, but unfortunately, I spent the night without water, power or phone, and my mobile phone's battery went dead. I stupidly waited until it went dark to find a torch, so I was clambering around using my iPod for light as I tried to find it and then find batteries for it. Not my most nimble of moments. In the night, I didn't sleep more than 15 minutes at a time without being woken up by an afterschock, or sirens outside, or the town hall's van going round making announcements that anyone in trouble should go to the community centre.

Everything came back on at 6am the following day and I managed to speak to friends and family at home and in Japan. I was in complete ignorant bliss of the tsunami and the damage that had been caused, so I was very shocked to find the number of emails and Facebook messages piling up. I was very grateful for Facebook yesterday - it was great that I managed to update my status to let people know that I was ok and put people's minds at rest. Seeing the pictures on the news really paints a scary picture and, thankfully, where I am is nothing like that at all...neither is Tokyo. Most of the country has been very lucky. The Japanese and the British media coverage has been VERY different. It seems even the BBC has sensationalised something that really doesn't need to be sensationalised at all, it is dreadful as it is and everyone knows that. I might write another piece about that another time. Of course, this massive earthquake and tsunami have caused a great deal of devastation in the area, and the media shouldn't play that down, but it doesn't need building up either.

Yesterday, last night and today, the afterschocks have been much smaller and further between for the most part. I don't think I've felt any in the last 3 hours or so (touch wood!). My supervisor from work drove me to the supermarket yesterday to get supplies and explained some more things about the earthquake to me, she also rang me at about 7.30pm on the night of the earthquake, when the phones were working briefly, to check that I was ok and that I had a torch etc. She has been amazing, because, it has been a very lonely time and not having any electricity on the first night was truly horrible, so even speaking to her for one minute was very reassuring, even if it was what put my phone out of battery - ironically just as she was telling me that if another massive one was going to come, my phone should bleep and warn me! The phone warning system was a bit broken she said the next day. None of us got anything for the actual quake (it's only about 10 seconds or so in advance anyway, but still...) and then I DID get one at about 7 on Friday evening and almost had a heart attack, running outside, thinking, it's going to be even bigger, seeing as I've got a warning this time, but, I didn't feel anything at all. Yesterday's ones were all correct. They come on the TV as well, anything that ranks about 3 on the Japanese scale I think. Amazing to get any warning at all really! Very intelligent!

Today, I've cleared up the last of the mess here, caught up on lack of sleep with little interruption and emailed a couple of friends. I've also made the mistake of thinking my bath was totally dry, so that it would be safe to try and hoover up the tiny bits of broken china in it, please picture that image to give yourself a laugh...the electric plug is a mile away as well so it was bit of a stretch around a corner, and then picture my alarmed face as I realise that some water has got inside the hoover and my bathroom floor is getting covered in brown water!! Still not quite sure what I'm gonna do about that...I hope it's not broken for good because it belongs to the board of education and I can't cope with fuss! What a plonker!

The supermarket trip yesterday showed that it was pretty much business as usual around here...hairdresser's was open, some kids were about in school uniform, obviously coming back from sport practice. I've heard that Tokyo is fairly similar. It's just the really hard hit areas around the coast in Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima that are in big trouble still it seems. There are some other electricity problems still in other parts of the country I think. I've been very lucky. Really, it's just time to think about the people who haven't been so fortunate. It's a massive shocking earthquake, and the tsunami has caused a lot of damage in certain areas. Many people are totally out of contact and are not sure if their relatives are safe or not. Naturally, the death toll is rising. Aftershocks and cold weather are making it even harder to sort things out. I hope people are able to make contact as soon as possible. Clearly the whole of Japan is shocked and worried about the people in the affected areas.

I've been very humbled by the amazing calmness and consideration of the Japanese people and the unity and support I've felt from all of my friends in Japan (not just the Japanese ones), let alone the concern from my friends, family, friends of family, and, indeed, people I've never heard of back in the UK...My Mum's been telling all about cousin George and the lady that comes into her work once a week, the next-door-neighbour-but-one's ex-girlfriend's dog etc. all asking about me...Thank you everyone for your concern! I am fine, just a bit, pardon the pun, shaken.

Teachers' Trip Take 1 - Travelling to Matsushima

The way Japanese people travel is truly astounding...sometimes a colleauge goes away for a couple of days or so and I get an omiyage from somewhere ridiculously far away like Italy on my desk. On enquiring what they could possibly have been doing in Italy for only FOUR DAYS or so, considering almost a whole day of it would be the plane journey alone, I get an account of the 18 or so cities that were visited, the pizza and spaghetti that was eaten and the one hundred and twenty five thousand photos that were taken, all featuring said teacher doing a peace sign in front of various sights and not smiling...probably didn't have time to smile.

So, with these ridiculously tightly organised and regimented travel stories in mind that I rather nervously accepted an invite to go on a trip with my teachers to Matsuthshima (松島）(left) in Miyagi prefecture　（宮城県, a city towards the North of Japan's main island (the one that Gunma is also on, in the middle somewhere), Honshu. It's just next to the city Sendai. The main aim of the trip is to bond (mainly achieved through drinking yourself silly) whilst seeing ever single thing that Miyagi has to offer, including many things on the way, soak in an onsen, eat a lovely dinner and take a million photos, all in the space of just over 24 hours. That was a CHARRENJI if ever there was one, especially as this story actually comes from over a year ago, when I still couldn't speak much Japanese. Departure was at ridiculous O'clock, on a coach from the school carpark. I was handed an enormous bag of snacks for the ride, which more than slightly scared me as to how long this coach trip could be...just how many dried squid things can one need for one journey???

Somehow, in spite of it being about 5am and in spite of us all arriving in time, within about 5 minutes of setting off, we were 'running late.' By this time, we were also already a bag of squid snacks down each (not me) and halfway through a can of alcoholic beverage (I was further due to nerves). I sat with the young teachers at the back of the bus, like the naughty kids, and we played drinking games and I chatted to many of them for the first time and it was really fun...the only annoying bit was the 15 minute interruptions to pile off of the coach, go to toilet, take a photo in front of a random tourist site and buy some omiyage that that region is 'famous' for...everywhere is supposedly famous for something in Japan, even Ita-where is famous for cucumbers, in spite of them just being normal cucumber and Ita-where not being famous full stop. Lunch was in a place that couldn't have been famous for anything more unfortunate...TONGUE. I was tucking into my tongue curry (the restaurant only did tongue dishes and it was the least tongue-y looking picture on the menu) downing more alcohol, cameras flashing all around me...I definitely felt like I was in Japan!

We continued rushing, because we were 'late' for the next couple of hours, with rushed pit stops and many sights, so remote that people literally couldn't tell me what they were. It was like a race for the omiyage shop and then back on to the coach. In the end, we arrived at the onsen hotel late-afternoon and it turned out that what were late was to get into the onsen! An onsen that is attached to our hotel and is open all night anyway!!

It's funny how sitting naked in a hot bath in the freezing cold knocking naked knees with your naked 40-year-old English teacher can sober you up. Let's say no more about onsenning with teachers.

left: one of the unknown sights

We then enkaied in a very drunken fashion (pretty enkai food to the right) and got up at the crack of dawn the next day to begin the same journey back down the motorway, but finding an incredible amount of unstopped at omiyage shops along the way. We went to a massive fish market that was really interesting, if a little scary, especially on a hangover, (amazing sushi though, BIG step up from tongue curry) a shrine (or two, or three), a history museum and went on a lovely boat trip around one of the most famous sights in Japan. It's loads of sort of mini cliffs and islands off the coast. It was very beautiful, but most of the teachers had already been, so spent the trip throwing leftover crisps from the giant snack bag to seagulls and queueing to buy omiyage at the boat's shop...I kid you not.

All in all, a fun, if a little stressful experience. Usually, a single guy going on holiday, coming back to say there was nudity and tongue would be a big success...slightly different here though! Here are some more photos....I have about 80 photos from 24 hours and I imagine that most of my teachers had at least three times that amount.

My Japanese teacher is off to Spain in a couple of weeks and is officially visiting more that one town per day, changing hotels every single night for 9 days...I feel the photo session could well be a long one!!

Kentucky Fried Christmas in Japan

Christmas in Japan is something that is incredibly hard to explain...you really have to see it to believe it...in fact, it has taken my second time round to believe it...who knows how many it would take for me to understand it!


In some ways, Japanese people celebrate Christmas equally as much as we do in the UK, in other ways they don't celebrate it at all. Basically, if you take all of the things about Christmas that you have found too tacky and annoying to cope with since the age of about 7, then do away with all of the nice and meaningful things about it, throw in a cardboard bucket of cardboard tasting KFC chicken and you have Christmas in Japan!! Delightful!!

The cheap and tacky sparkling and flashing decorations arrive in the shops just as early as they do in the UK (mid-October??) and lights (actually some pretty impressive ones) hijack shopping centres and city high streets, and indeed some people's houses...not bad for a non-Christian nation. Japanese versions of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" fill the air and cheap, super-ecstatic happy Christmas adverts (and Japanese adverts and pretty cheap and pretty happy all through the year) fill the airtime. Signs with pictures of Santa and reindeer etc. can be found in almost every shop and all the kids were doing Christmas crafts at primary school (probably even more so than I ever remember doing when I was at school), not that that stopped my last English lesson with EVERY class being another Christmas craft lesson. I don't mean to sound like a Scrooge, and we did have fun in the lessons (making card, snowflakes, carboard stockings and Christmas crackers) but the whole affair really is a bit of an overkill, especially considering what Christmas actually means to Japanese people...roughly nothing.






On a side note, can't put pictures of my kids up, but this is Christmas crackers at the adult class...think that's allowed. Christmas crackers really is my favourite class to teach all year, I'm only pretending to be a Scrooge to fit my sarcastic blog...I would recommend it to any ALT, it's a great lesson, even my little terrors of a 4th grade (perfect age for it) love me after that one!





For instance, ask a classroom of children (or indeed a staffroom of adults) which date Christmas Day is and you get responses ranging from the 21st to the 27th or so...ask them what they actually do to celebrate the day (bearing in mind this day already spans a week) and most people will either say "nothing much" or "we eat Christmas cake". OK, some kind of tradition that links everybody's Christmas together..."And what is Japanese Christmas cake like?" I ask, expecting a clear answer (not like our Christmas fruit cake though because that would be far too authentic), but no, I get a different response from every person "sponge cake!" "cake with cherry icing", "chocolate cake", "short cake" "....cake" (insert cake name and I'm sure somebody in Japan considers it to be traditional Christmas cuisine. And what is the traditional Christmas meal pray tell? KFC!! KFC!! Not even a posh Japanese fast food restaurant like Freshness Burger...a greasy cardboard box of deep fried chicken. When and how this came about is a mystery to me, although I am willing to bet that it is something to do with the Colonel from the adverts looking a little bit like Father Christmas. Also, the life-sized (meaning he's human-sized, I'm not sure he is the same size as the actual original Colonel...just a disclaimer in case some Kentuckian does me for false advertising) white plastic statue of the Colonel who stands outside every (I think) KFC in Japan is dressed up as Santa for the Christmas period (ie late August until December 22nd probably). If you don't believe me....

Well the KFC Colonel Saunders Claus statue is pretty cute, and if you've got cute, you've got 99% of Japan eating out of your hands, or your cardboard buckets in his case.

Understandably, this Christian festival is a normal working day in the Buddhist and Shinto country of Japan, and understandably nobody does anything much special to celebrate, but not so understandably is why everybody sells, buys, makes, sings and talks Christmas crap for two months prior to the non-existant celebration, happening in various houses, if at all, on any day towards the end of December. It seems very strange to make such a fuss over something that is not really celebrated when it comes down to it and something for which most of my students at least, have no idea why it is even there. "Is it Santa's birthday?" "Is it because Santa is nice and chose to give us presents in December?" "Is it Mark's birthday? (2 younger kids actually guessed that, I was tempted to say yes, but they all would have believed me and the teacher might have too so it seemed a bit too cruel, and ever so slightly blasphemous). Anyway, I've taught them all a little bit about Jesus, which they can forget in time for next year so that somebody else can teach them again! I have long since given up trying to work out why Japan is the way it is and this is the exact sort of baffling reason why...Christmas in Japan is finger-licking bad.

Japan and gift giving お土産 omiyage

Japan is nothing short of obsessed with its tradition of お土産 (omiyage). Omiyage are gifts given to just about every person you know to say thank you, to say that you've been on holiday, to say 'please do something for me', to say hello, to say goodbye, and generally any message that needs to be (or doesn't really need to be) conveyed. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I actually get more gifts a day than I do conversations...today I have received two bisctuits, one chocolate, four satsumas and five small spinning tops (?)...not bad if you ask me! Writing this article, however, has just made me realise that I have left those four satsumas in my desk over the weekend to rot...DAMN!!

In all holiday destinations there are rows of shops exclusively aimed at selling gifts to take back to friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. Many service stations along the motorway have a variety of gifts from nearby towns, presumable for people who are on their way home and have forgotten to buy for somebody or for people who don't actually want to go to the place, they just want to go halfway, buy the gifts, and go back. Particularly popular are huge boxes of fairly generic cakes or biscuits, individually wrapped (perfect for splitting between many, particuarly for laying on the desks of colleagues) with the name of the place written on the wrapper. These must be bought in their millions in Japan! A bit (exactly) like this ....

Of course, me going back to England for the Christmas holiday was something that everybody I have ever met and his wife knew about...meaning that I had to buy a gift for everyone I have ever met and all of their wives, which need to fulfill many ruthless criteria :

1. Be the appropriate size and worth to match the person you are buying for and your relationship with them.

2. Be sufficiently typically English, and by that I don't mean something that is actually typically English, but something that a Japanese person considers to be typically English.

3. Be sufficiently cheap that I can afford to buy 40 million of them.

4. Be sufficiently small and light that they will all fit in one suitcase.

5. In the case of the teachers, be edible and individually wrapped so that I can go and neatly place one on every person's desk.

Hence a LOT of trapsing around Tescos with a list of names as long as my arm and this mental check list.....Not an easy task!!

After emptying my suitcase, you can see about half of them here...

I eventually settled for 4 boxes of Christmas crackers, 5 mini Christmas puddings, 2 packets of custard mix, 3 boxes of after dinner mints, 3 packets of mini Tesco rip-off Mars bars, 2 packets of sherbert sweets, one mixed bag of sweets, 2 bags of liquorice twists, one stick of fudge, 4 Kitkats with a Santa picture moulded into them, one Turkish Delight, two boxes of 12 mini mince pies, 2 boxes of Jaffa cakes, 5 CDs, one fake paisley tie (one pound New Look! Bargain!!), one diary, 3 jars of marmalade, one packet of biscuits, one packet of strawberry bonbons, one pen with London sights on it, 3 magazines, 2 boxes of nuts, one packet of Angel Delight, 3 boxes of teas, one mini box of After 8s, 3 mini bottles of scotch, 2 Union Jack mugs and one horrible keyring with an English footballer on it.

These will now have to be painstakingly and stressfully packaged up cutely and divided between....everybody in 7 staff rooms and everybody at the Board of Education of my town, one group of lunch ladies, one man at one nursery (the only staff room who didn't get a set of gifts for themselves cos I don't like them, so only he gets one), 17 teachers at various schools who I am either sort of obliged to give special presents to or who are just really nice to me so deserve one, my hairdresser, the other hairdresser staff, two volunteers who help with English at one of the schools, my taiko group, the lady who develops my photos for me, 3 ALT friends, my Japanese teacher and his wife, my boss and her husband and 7 other Japanese friends...and I've already realised that I've forgotten someone and have to try and conjur an extra gift up. It's a lovely tradition and for every gift I give, I'm sure I receive about 10 but it's a bloody stress and between you and me, given the choice of a CD/box of mince pies/Christmas cracker or 4 satsumas/5 spinning tops, I know which side I'd be on...I am a quality gift giver.

Two recent examples, however, or amazingly lovely and completely unnecessary gifts that I have received remind me why I shouldn't be complaining at all. Firstly, in the run up to Christmas, the Itakura International Association (who knows why they have one...it has about 100 Japanese members whose average age probably exceeds the membership figure, and one foreigner...me) were running some English conversation classes. I could (and might) write a massive article about the ridiculousness that those classes entailed, but for now, let's just say that I basically went to help out 4 times, for a total of 8 hours, did very little and STILL got paid (even though I begged them not to pay me as I'd done nothing and didn't need their money, but....). Anyway, one lovely old lady was at the last class (it was the first time I'd seen her at the classes though I had met her before at another International Association meeting thing, when we spoke only in Japanese) and it turns out that she can speak almost perfect English! She did a self introduction which lasted almost as long as the whole lesson should itself! Anyway at the end, I gave them all some German style lebkuchen that I'd made (nothing like the real thing but really nice...such an easy recipe from the Beeb, stuff you Nigella and your posh ingredients, you only need flour, butter, honey and spices!) and then we made Christmas crackers with toilet rolls some snaps my parents had sent me from England. Everyone had a great time, and the local TV were there again (that is my FIFTH appearance if you don't mind). Anyway, a few days later, one of the teachers from the course contacted me...the old lady had given them this handmade card and huge posh expensive box of chocolates and biscuits for me because she was 'touched' by my lesson (bear in my that I am being paid and that all I did was explain how to selotape a cracker snap to some tissue paper and roll it round a toilet roll).

The second amazing omiyage received actually defies belief. At the end of year enkai for one of my schools we were drinking sake. There is this old man who is sort of an upper-class receptionist...I have no idea what he does except that he used to be a teacher and now he is really ill and goes to hospital a lot, so I think they might have just given him this job where he doesn't have to do much so that he still has a job. Anyway, bottom line is, I never teach with him or work with him, just talk to him occasionally on the days when I'm at his school (which is only once a week on average)...anyway, he was so impressed that I like sake, and I mentioned that my parents like it too and that I had bought some to take back to England as a Christmas present for them. Everybody was very drunk by this point, but he was very very impressed that we all like sake (very) and asked for my address so that he could send my parents some...egged on by other colleagues (who thought my address was so cool because it was written in English ???) I drunkedly gave him my address and thought nothing more of it...I thought that in his state, it would be a miracle if the address even made it out of the restaurant, let alone if he could remember the next day what it was or why he had taken it....GUESS AGAIN MARK! Came home mid-holiday to find a HUGE parcel from Japan containing FOUR, that's FOUR litre bottles of sake sent to me by that lovely drunken man (he sent it a few days later, so I am assuming that he wasn't still drunk by the way). The cost of the goods and the postage was written on it...well over a hundred quid in total!! One hundred pounds! For somebody he barely knows...and what a hassle as well! Half of me was about to burst into tears of happiness and half of me was about to burst into tears of 'What the hell am I supposed to take back to match this??' I have asked my boss for advice and she doesn't know either...the saga continues. Anyway, what with the bottle my parents received when they came to Japan as a gift, the one they got from me for Christmas and these four, my parents now have enough sake to rival a Japanese off-lisence!! Cue drunken Skype sessions from now on!

Japanese People Are Lovely

I have just been speaking to a friend on Skype and it's official...I have been away from England for too long, and I am now scared of going back. Everybody in Japan is so nice all the time, I can't bear to think of going back to being suspicious and angry and having to listen to loud people talking and playing music on the train.

The last few weeks have provided many many examples of Japanese kindness, and, as I can't be arsed to structure this post in any way whatsoever, I am just going to bullet point them:

* Possibly the shyest lady in the world, the librarian from my junior high school, took me to and home from the enkai last week (YES I am totally in the loop!) and has asked me to go for drinks at her house with her and her husband.
* My new landlords (husband and wife) have just come round to help me fix my TV, but couldn't (as my TV is too old to connect to this new flat's digital whatever) so they have just GIVEN me a TV that they 'weren't using' (which has 2011 written on it, so it is not only new, it is from the FUTURE) in an unfurnished flat for free and brought me chocolates and biscuits too! HOW NICE IS THAT??
* When I moved three people from the town hall wouldn't let me pay for a van or anything, they all used the town hall's van things and spent essentially a whole day helping me take things from one apartment to the next...one of them paid for lunch too and just wouldn't let me pay even to say thankyou (I gave them some sweets instead in a pretty little bag which is definitely the Japanese way to thank people).
* The home economics teacher from my school who is lovely and who I speak to sometimes (I go to the cooking club sometimes) went to Kyoto and bought me a fan there! I don't know her that well so there was absolutely no need, and I totally bum fans, so that made me so happy.
* I have started up a new scheme at school where every week I choose a conversational English keyword, the sort that isn't in their rubbish textbooks (so far: week 1-long time no see, week 2-easy peasy) and if the students come and say five of them to me over a term, they can have a prize, and it has gone down so well! Everyone has been so supportive (the teachers I mean) and loads of kids are taking part even though they don't really know what the prizes are...that would NEVER happen in England. They are even allowing me to announce the keyword once a week on the school speaker thing ( you know like the ones you wee on American TV shows like Saved By The Bell) even though it's blatently not important enough for that. Eveyrone has been so nice happy to support me with it, I'm over the moon! (Oooo, that could be week 3's keyword).
* When we turned up at the football, 3 of us had tickets and one of us didn't, and the ticket and no ticket entrance was different. Instead of just sending my mate off with a point and a grunt as I imagine they would in England, this little old man in a fluorescent yellow jacket walked my friend all the way round the stadium to the other entrace, helped her buy the ticket and walked her all the way back to find us. Later on, we were trying to quickly pour some beer out of the cans we'd bought in the shop outside into our paper cups and this man came over...in England it would be to confiscate them, shout at you, possibly kick you out, in Japan...it was to offer us the can recycling bag, and just kept telling us to take our time pouring, he would wait next to us until we'd finished.

This list could go on forever.

I heart Japan.

Hanami and Footie

Sorry for the delay guys! I have been without internet for a couple of weeks or so. Time for an update on my last two weekends of fun, which have involved two things...one very Japanese...hanami, which is "flower viewing" and one very British...going to see the footie, but it was oh so very Japan-style.

The flowers that you "view" at a hanami party are called "sakura" or "cherry blossoms". They are Japan's national flower and their blooming is awaited with great anticipation (and much Japanese fuss) all year round. The joy and beauty of sakura and the hanami parties were sung at me on a more or less daily basis right from the onset of winter, as they would signify the start of spring and were just "so beautiful" etc. To start with, I was very excited, but, after a while (as I got to know more about Japan and it's fussing ways) I began to suspect that cherry blossoms were in fact just going to be exactly the same as the annoying pink blossoms that we get in the UK that are pretty for about 20 minutes until they got washed away by some drip drip drop little April huge fuck-off storms and become a horrible mush that sticks to your shoes. However, this time, Japan had a right to fuss. They were truly beautiful. The last of them are just fading now, which is such a shame, but there are so many trees that blossom all at the same time, which just floods the country in white, creating many a Kodak moment. A hanami party basically consists of sitting under the sakura trees somewhere and having a picnic and drinking yourself silly...so I was all up for a bit of that. I enjoyed myself very much, and it is nice to say that, after 4 months of feeling quite a lot like an icecube, that spring has FINALLY sprung! (except for the brief interlude of SNOW last Friday that I have still not forgiven Japan for yet.).

Last weekend, I did something very British...I went to watch a game of football (or soccer as I have disgustingly now started calling it, just to make myself understood by Japanese people). Me and some other English teachers went to see our local team play (and lose 3-1) in a home game in the second league here. The atmosphere was actually incredible. Forget your drunken racist wankers making slurs at every other fan/player/ref etc. (ok, so I'm a West Ham fan) and replace it with a very family atmosphere and thanking the players when they do well (or even when they don't), not criticising/abusing them. The guy in front of us kept shouting "Thank you goalkeeper" in English for some reason, even though our goalkeeper was truly awful. In the UK, I would be sure that that was sarcasm, but in Japan, I am equally sure that it wasn't. The chanting literally lasted from before the start until the very end, without barely a pause for breath (or even to actually watch the game), which suits me, cos 90 minutes is a long time right? Haha. The chants were ridiculously organised and joyous, with leaders announcing which one would be next and everyone joining in word-for-word. Me and my friends were maybe not so good at working out when to start and stop and how many claps to do etc, but it was great fun. I the Japanese crowd are wicked at the World Cup. In true Japanese stlye, I finished the day by buying a "strap" for my phone, which is a little string thing with the mascot on to hang on your mobile and jingle jangle wherever you go...no Japanese experience is complete without something cute and annoying like that.

The Japanese Enkai 宴会

As I mentioned in my previous post, I finally, somehow, wangled an invite to not ONE but TWO of my school's end of year "enkais" , after 8 months of being totally left off of the invitation list. An enkai ressembles an office party in the UK to a certain extent I suppose, in that there is a meal and lots of alcohol and everyone attends, but in Japan there is (as always) a much greater sense of ceremony I think. There were many speeches, and everyone was wearing suits etc. In fact, it's possibly the smartest I've ever seen my teachers dress, that includes the all-important, over-rehearsed graduation ceremonies. The meal at both the enkais was incredible...sushi and sashimi (which is quite an expensive treat in Japan and not eaten by everyone, every day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as my pre-coming-coming-to-Japan dreams painted it), various other dishes, mostly seafood, mostly delish, both had a slightly questionable hot salty egg mousse thing which stank to high heavens and tasted just as bad, but all in all, let's say that having been to these two enkais, two days on the trot, I didn't need to eat again for at least another week and I can't believe this nation, that can make and enjoy such incredible food, puts up with SCHOOL LUNCH every other day!! I was also slightly bewildered to see that this huge delicious, expensive banquet received a similarly enthusiastic cry of "delicious" as the school lunch does every day, but nothing more. Did they really think that is was just as oishii (delicious) as school lunch?? I know which one I'd rather...

The only thing in more abundance than the food is the drink. Mostly beer only, with a little bit of Japanese sake going around. All the teachers pay a fixed fee for the meal and all-you-can-drink alcohol. Japanese people get drunk very quickly, which was very amusing for me. It didn't take me much longer though, as I was a bit nervous about the prospect of a whole night in Japanese, where I knew everybody would be watching me and fussing over me as the first ALT (and therefore foreigner) to be invited in this arsecrack town for years. Another reason for getting drunk so quickly, from my point of view at least, is the Japanese custom that you never pour your own drink, but you pour others and wait for them to pour yours. It's kind of a way to start a conversation with someone...you pick up a big bottle of beer from the middle of the table and offer it to the person you want to talk to. My glass was a fairly popular choice, even if it was already full to the brim. By observing others during my time here, I've noticed that most people who are offered drink when their glass is full, still don't say no, but just take a huge swig and let the other person refill it....I followed suit. I had no idea how much I had drunk, and that can be a recipe for disaster. Still, I wasn't as drunk as my Japanese couterparts, so all's well that ends well I suppose.

Each enkai seems to have a group of people who are the enkai organisers, the "kanji" 監事. They choose the restaurant and officially invite people etc. Even though one of my English teachers, who speaks very good English was a kanji for one of the events, he still didn't ask me, but luckily one of the other ones did (very brave of him too). At both of mine, the kanji also went round making sure they spoke to everyone over the course of the evening, which gave me some really interesting conversations with some lovely teachers I'd never spoken to before, and some incredibly awkward ones with teachers who had clearly been dreading coming to me all night. All in all, it was great fun and AMAZING for gossip, which is always a good thing.

After both of them, we went to karaoke...the same karaoke on both nights which was rather embarrassing and gave the staff a bit of foreigner shock/deja vu I think. When I arrived on the Friday with the primary school staff, two of my other three primary schools were also at the SAME karoke place...this shows how lively the next city to the arsecrack (the arsecheek if you will) is. All enkai fun happened in the arsecheek, as there is officially no fun to be had whatsoever in my town, the arsecrack. I think arsecrack fun might even be illegal, if you'll pardon the pun. Anyway, karaoke was all Japanese songs, so I used the time to get more goss and to drink myself silly, as opposed to listening or joining in. I was forced to sing twice at both parties in English, which mainly got the response of "wow, your English is so good", which I think is typical Japanese politeness for "wow, I will compliment you on being able to speak your native language, as a distraction from the fact that your singing sounds like a cat being suffocated by a school-lunch choco-bread." Oddly enough, but unsuprising in Japan, is that in the second enkai, they chose an ABBA song for me AND a Beatles song for me, and I didn;t know either of them!! I thought I knew every song by both of those artists...but not the ones that hit it big in Japan. I was honest with the Beatles one, which came first (they could not believe it...possibly the biggest gossip of the night) but for the ABBA one I just couldn't cope with seeing their shock again and so I just sang along and hoped that they would admire how well I could pronounce the words again!

All in all, the enkais were wicked! It was a great way to get to know my colleagues outside of class and with a bit of help in the form of beer. PLease keep your fingers crossed for me that I am now in the loop and that I will be asked again!!

Primary School Graduation Ceremony

Graduation season has finally come to a close in Japan, after a month of rehearsing and possibly 5 months of fussing. Hence, this will be my last post about graduation ceremonies I promise!!

I had a choice of which primary school to go to, as they all have their ceremonies at the same time. I chose the East school as those 6th graders (12 year olds) are my favourites. It was a lovely ceremony, which I was expecting as I'd already seen it 18 times or so in rehearsal. What was amazing though, was that for all the time they had spent practising, the teachers still didn't know where they were supposed to be sitting and they still didn't leave enough space in between the front set of chairs and various paper flower decorations (a favourite in Japan it seems) for the girl in the wheelchair to get through. Also, considering how regulated so much of it was (the speed and direction of walking, plus exactly where and when to turn, the timing of the bowing, the importance of everyone standing up in complete unison before they started singing, army stylee) there were still some truly shoddy bits that apparently didn't seem to matter. For instance, all the other kids from the other years didn't have to wear their school uniform so were dressed more for a visit to the park than a formal ceremony and the graduating kids seemed to just have to wear anything smart, so some were wearing their primary school uniforms, some were in their junior high school uniforms for next year, some of the boys were in suits and some girls were sort of in party dresses with jackets. I was just thinking of England, and I'm sure everybody wearing the same uniform smartly would be much important than at what point everybody stood up, because you can get every single one of the 400 kids to stand up in the exact same milisecond and bow for the exact same amount of time, but if they are all wearing Kappa t-shirts and Barbie trainers they are still gonna look like a bit of a rabble you know? Obviously, different things are valued here. An especially touching part came after the ceremony (although the important people had already left, presumable to do something very important like scoff their buns down), when all of the kids walked round the school with their parents in a big line, and all of the kids and teachers lined the corridors and clapped for them and high-fived them and stuff (high five may have been me only, but that's cos I'm cool Mark-sensei).

My actual role in the ceremony was simply to amuse the kids as I entered by looking confused as to which seat I should sit in (I chose that role for myself) and just to watch and bow at the exact same time as all the other teachers (whether that was achieved or not I am not sure). Before it started, I also had to stand at the entrance and welcome the parents, and somehow work out who wasn't simply a parent but an important person, like from the police (he was easy he was wearing a uniform) or people from the board of education or whatever, as I had to give parents a pamphlet, but I had to give the "important" people (using that term VERY loosely indeed) not only a leaflet but also these two little commemorative buns for some reason. I don't ask question, I just obey, but I felt so stupid trying to guess who was bun-worthy and who wasn't. Everybody also looked very shocked to be greeted by a foreigner, so that caused quite a large amount of fuss. I was really happy that they'd given me a job to do though, all be it a bun-related one. There was a bit of a slipper emergency that I was sort of involved in too. You can't wear your outdoor shoes indoors in Japan...not just in houses, in schools too, and even many restaurants. The regular teachers have their own indoor shoes at school, as I have so many schools, for most of mine I have to wear the visitor slippers which are little plastic-y flipflop things, in a deligtful shade of neon turquoise, which cover about half of my big fat foreign foot...it's a very hobbly experience. Anyway, as we had so many visitors on the same day, which is unusual, there was a bit of a visitor slipper shortage...something else I would have thought might have been considered at some point during all of these rehearsals but wasn't. Anyway, as it turns out, there wasn't a shortage, it was just another fuss over nothing, which was really the theme of the day. And I enjoyed watching all the important people, carrying their buns, dressed up to the razz in suits but also sporting turquoise flip flop slippers, flipping around the school.

Other fusses of the day included a 5-minute discussion (no exaggeration) over which colour and type of pen should be used to tick off the important people's names as they arrived. Also, I have came to realise (although there had already been many signs which I might write about in another post), that Japan is a TRULY hypochondriac nation. In all of the rehearsals even, at least one kid was taken out sick....I mean....WHAT...how likely is someone to get so sick they ahve to leave in an hour-long rehearsal?? So you can imagine that in the pressure of standing up at the right time in a pair of Barbie trainers at the real ceremony proved too much for many of the little ones and the school nurse was running around like a headless chicken with people "sick". What exactly the illness was remains unclear, but I am guessing it may well be an overdose of rehearsal.

Year 3 Secondary School 卒業式 (graduation ceremony) and the 'Meeting of Thanks'

Leaving school fever is still rife in Japan. Last Friday I went to the 卒業式　'graduation ceremony'　for the 3rd graders at the juniour high school. They are about 15 years old, and they are my oldest students, so the ones I can speak to the easiest in English (they have been studying it for quite a few years) and I won't teach them again as of now. It was actually a really touching ceremony (only because I hadn't had to go to any of the umpteen rehearsals...I'm sure that would have watered it down a lot). I managed to refrain from crying, which is more than I can say for many of the parents, some of the teachers, one of the women giving a speech and most of the students, most notably the super cool, super hard, super masculine baseball captain who was SOBBING his big fat face off and wiping it with a cloth for about an hour. I love him though so it was really sweet. There were a lot of speeches, a lot of singing and an awful lot of bowing. But I think the ceremony of it all is quite nice really...I wouldn't want to participate for fear of doing something wrong and causing a different type of tear, but watching safely from my seat, with only a few group bows to take part in was fine. Because it's a small town with a community feel, EVERYBODY comes to this ceremony...the mayor, all the education people from the town hall, the head of the police, the head of the fire brigade, all of the primary school head teachers, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and co. It's all very dramatic.

On a personal note, I unfortunately didn't get to say goodbye to many of my students, even though I would have liked to. They sort of had about 40 minutes of free time in the very organised and regimented day to say their goodbyes to all of their teachers and I didn't feel it was really my place to get in the way of them and their parents thanking their actual teachers and sports club leaders (they all spend a lot of time (I mean A LOT) a their after-school clubs here). And of course they all had to thank the candlestick maker. Still, I got to say farewell and wish good luck to a few of them and waved at many more...I'm sure they all noticed that I was there anyway, which hopefully made them happy. I also received letters from two students, thanking me for teaching them and saying that they like English a lot more since I've been teaching them, that it's been fun and interesting etc and that they see the importance of English and will study it hard at their next school...which is pretty much the whole point of my job so that made me ridiculously happy.

Another leaving event of the week was the 'Meeting of Thanks' which I was invited to last week at one of my primary schools (see previous post). It was actually amazing...I was so chuffed to be invited. All of the leavers (and it's a small school, so when I say all, I mean 16) put on a comedy show, a dance, a magic show and cooked some (fairly rank to be honest, but the thought was nice, and it was better than school lunch) rice and other snacks. All the teachers and some other people who I didn't know (possibly acquaintances of the candlestick maker) sat around and ate and watched the show. They sat me with the boy who had written the invitation so that we could speak in English and you could tell how happy he was (he's my new favourite...I'm very fickle) Then we played dodgeball together, which I unfortunately haven't miraculously developed a skill for since the last time I played at the age of about 11, as I had hoped. I literally managed to lose 8 months-worth of built up respect and coolness in a 10-minute game of dodgeball...sayonara.