Bath Time!

Learning about the Japanese work ethic has been interesting over the past few months here in Funehiki.  Students and teachers alike put in ridiculous amounts of hours, and Saturdays are by no means automatic days off.  Work here is really important; there’s always something more to do.  On the other hand, such a dedicated work force can also lead to increased stress and missed time with family.  The Japanese have taught me a lot about the value of work, but this past weekend I learned a new lesson from them: the value of relaxation.  Yes, the Japanese know how to work hard, but they know how to relax as well. 

Last weekend as a thank you for working hard at English Camp (see previous post) our boss took all us English teachers out for two days of rest and relaxation.  Our trip started at 7:40 a.m. - a little early for a Saturday morning but definitely worth it.  We divided between two vans – one was for those that wanted another hour of sleep, while the other was for anyone else.  I had already finished my morning coffee, so it was van number two for me.  One of my friends brought along a trivia book, so the four of us spent the trip quizzing each other.  

Our first stop was a hiking path through Goshiki-Numa, the Five Colored Lakes.  These lakes were formed the last time nearby Mt. Bandai erupted.  Sulfur from the eruption causes the lakes to have very beautiful coloration.  Keep in mind that this was also during the third weekend in October, so the leaves were in their prime.  Greens, yellows, and reds were everywhere.  We had a guide for the hike, and he did a great job at pointing out all the different varieties of Japanese Maples along the path.  The colors weren't quite as spectacular as a NY fall, but was still very beautiful.

After we finished the trail we had bentos for lunch, and then it was back to the vans to head off to another trail.  This trail led to a nearby waterfall, perfectly framed in fall reds and yellows.  The first half of the trail consisted of a large staircase; I took my time on the stairs, focusing on each step as I ascended.  There is a peace in the woods like nowhere else, and I found it on those stairs.  And did I mention that it was a perfect day to be outside looking at leaves?  Sunny, brisk but not too cold.  After getting some great pictures by the waterfall it was back down the stairs to the vans.  Have you ever run down a mountain?  I like to do this whenever I can, so I hit the stairs pretty fast, and ended up wiping out about halfway down.  No, just kidding, I made it down fine.  I think running down those stairs was the best part of the weekend, actually.

Finished with all our outdoor activities for the day our vans took us to the Lake Inawashiro Resort.  The resort is situated right in between Lake Inawashiro and Mt. Bandai, providing a scenic view no matter where you look.  And then came the real treat: onsen.  Onsen is public bathing with water from natural volcanic hot springs, full of all sorts of minerals that are supposed to be good for you.  They are very popular all throughout Japan, and it’s no wonder why.   Four years in Shenawana Hall at Houghton College taught me some of the values of public bathing, but I didn’t even know.  I had always found baths to be relaxing, but I would get bored pretty quick.  The idea of spending an hour sitting and soaking didn’t seem that appealing, but I figured I would give it a try anyway.  There were three different baths, two inside and one outside.  Inside, one bath was very hot.  I couldn’t stay in it for too long before moving outside.  The outside bath was a little cooler, but still fairly hot.  And of course the outside bath had a stunning view of the lake.  The other inside bath was freezing, and taking a quick dip in it was very refreshing.  They also had a sauna at the onsen, kept at close to 200 degrees F.  I spent close to two hours in the onsen that afternoon, and I headed back for another 45 minutes after dinner too.  I’ve never been so relaxed in my life. 

Dinner was a fantastic five-course French feast.  The tables were set with about 10 pieces of silverware (real silver) per person.  The first course included some raw ebi (shrimp), mushrooms, foie gras, and something else I don’t know what.  And it was all pretty good (even the mushrooms).  A quick word on mushrooms: I hate them.  I’ve always done anything I could to avoid them.  But I have adopted a policy here of “Say yes to everything,” and that includes mushrooms.  So I’ve been doing my best with them, and I’ve actually had a few experiences with them that haven’t been negative in the past few months.  One of those times came in the second course: Mushroom soup.  I hate to say it, but it was pretty good.  (Mom, I wish I could see the look on your face right now.  Yeah, yeah, I know, you told me so.)  Course 3 was salmon, and it was the best salmon I’ve had since living in the Pacific Northwest.  But the main course was yet to come: STEAK!  One important characteristic of Japanese cuisine is to have small portions of a great variety of foods.  So we were all expecting the steak to come out in this fashion and be fairly small.  Nope.  It was enormous.  And cooked perfectly.  Desert was course number five and consisted in small portions of fruit, cake, and ice cream.  What a meal.

Sunday was rainy, which was ok because we didn’t have any hiking or other outdoor activities planned.  We drove to Aizu for our final two stops of the weekend.  Aizu is famous for its painted candles, so we went to a shop where they make/sell these candles.  But we didn’t know that we were going to have a chance to paint our own candles.  Once we got in the shop the people there took us upstairs, explained the process of making and painting the candles, and then led us into a room with tables set with paints and blank candles.  We each got to paint our own candle and take it home with us.  I’m sure for some of our group, this was the highlight of their weekend.  As you may know, I don’t have the skills of an artist, so it was not exactly my cup of tea.  But hey, I tried. 

After that we went to a bakery/café in another part of Aizu for lunch.   Bread and baked goods do not really exist in Japan, so it was really special to get a chance to enjoy some fresh bread and pastries.  I think that was the first piece of wheat bread I’ve had since entering the country.  After lunch it was back to the vans for the drive home.  What a weekend.  Yes, people in Japan work very hard, but they also know how to get every ounce of relaxation possible out of a weekend.  And I’m sure I’ll be back to onsen soon.

English Camp!

Tamura is a special place for students to learn English.  I think you would be hard pressed to find another part of Japan with a student-to-ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) ratio as high as the one here.   As such, we can do some things here for students that you wouldn’t find in other parts of the country.  One of these things is English Camp.  English Camp is a two-day program that all the sixth graders in the town get to experience.  All students begin studying English in middle school, so one goal of the camp is to give kids a little bit of a head start in English study.  We also want the kids to start having fun with English, so we play a lot of games and crafts, and teach a little lesson about the most important American holiday (at least in the mind of a sixth grader), Halloween.  Yay candy!  Another goal of the camp is for kids to get to know students from other schools – when kids go to middle school, much like how we do things in the states, students from various elementary schools are combined.  We group students together that will be at the same middle school next year.  So not only are kids getting a head start on English and having fun at the same time, they are also meeting new friends and forming relationships they can look forward to next year.  We ran a total of four camps over the past two weeks, one for each of the middle schools in town. 

Day one of camp was always a little awkward to start.  Kids can be shy, especially when you put them in a group with a crazy off-the-wall American.  But we would always get over that quick enough.  Camps had anywhere from 70 to 170 kids, and we would break them into groups of 15 or so.  We started the day with simple introductions and then played some ice breakers and name games.  It’s fun being in a new country doing these sorts of games because they are all new to the kids here.  I’m used to kids being bored with ice breakers and name games back in the States, because they’ve seen them all already.  Kids over here are hesitant at first, but they get really excited about these games once they understand the rules.  I wonder what Japanese ice breakers look like, or if they even have an equivalent for that over here.  Some students did teach me a Japanese version of Red Light – Green Light a few days ago; they were excited to learn the American variant after teaching me how the Japanese play the game.  After ice breakers we would have to come up with our team name.  We gave each team a list of adjectives and a list of nouns.  They would pick their favorite from each list and combine them to make a name.  This led to some interesting names.  This year English Camp got to see the Big Bananas, Pink Monkeys, Dangerous Underpants, Cool Tigers, and Rainbow Kings, among others.  After choosing a team name students would have time to make a team poster.

The second part of day one was the infamous shopping game.  Each team was a different store (pet store, candy store, school supply store, etc.).  We took time to teach the vocabulary of what each store sold, and then we taught a simple shopping dialogue.  After some practice, we let the kids loose in our makeshift strip-mall, half the kids manning the stores, the other half trying to buy all the items on their shopping lists with the fake money we provided them.  It was a fun game, and a good way to get kids speaking English.  When we would teach the shopping dialogue, most of the students would be really nervous to try and practice.  But the chaos of the kids running around trying to get to each store provided the perfect cover for students to try the dialogue without being afraid of making mistakes.  I’m pretty sure everyone had it down by the end of the day, even the students that had been terrified to speak in English at the start of the day. 

Day two was all about Halloween.  At the start of the day we would have plenty of supplies set out and the kids would get busy making masks and decorating candy bags in preparation for the afternoon’s Halloween Party.  After all the sequins and stickers and pompoms and markers were cleaned up, we would spend some time practicing writing the alphabet; most students already knew the alphabet, but it was good for them to practice, and there were enough students that didn’t know much about writing letters that it was a worthwhile time.  But after lunch came what most of the kids would say was the highlight of camp: The Halloween Party.  All the teachers got dressed up in costumes and paraded around the students, with another teacher and myself giving energetic introductions of each costume.  We had a couple cowgirls, some Barbies, Pooh and Tigger, and I was (of course) Pikachu.   After the parade we would take some time to explain what happens on Halloween in the States, and then we got into a massive jonken (rock, paper, scissors) tournament.  Let me pause here at say a word about rock, paper, scissors.  It is way more popular over here than in the States.  Students are playing all the time; teachers will play with students sometimes to determine how big a homework assignment will be; they have different things you say depending on how many times you throw the same thing (e.g. both throwing rock, both throwing paper).  People take it pretty seriously over here.  Anyway, that to say that a jonken tourney in Japan holds a lot more excitement that a rock, paper, scissors tourney would in the States.  After that we would play one last large group game before ending camp.  That would be sharks and minnows, if the space allowed.  Again, here is a game that is old hat to any kid in the States, but is brand new to the kids over here.  Needless to say, they have a lot of fun with it. 

After the Halloween party we conclude the English Camp.  A quick note on meetings or programs in Japan: formality and structure is highly valued, even when working with 12-year-olds.  Before and after each section of camp it was imperative that someone would announce that we were officially starting or officially ending.  At the beginning of day one each teacher would have to give a brief introduction and say how excited they were about camp.  At the end both teachers and students would get up and say something about their favorite part of the camp.  There is a particular way to do everything in Japan, it seems.  Sometimes as an American the Japanese way seems strange or even inefficient, but what can I say?  When in Rome…

So we did it.  English Camp 2012 is done!  And this weekend comes the celebratory retreat to a nearby onsen, which you will probably be hearing about in a future post. 

This post was long overdue; sorry for that.  As you can see, though, I’ve been a little busy with English Camp the last few weeks.  And maybe a little bit of culture shock has left me without the energy necessary to bang out a new post.  That might be an interesting topic for a future post: culture shock.  Everyone experiences when they come over here, but for each person it looks a little different.  I’m still figuring out how it’s really affecting me, so maybe I’ll let ya’ll in on what it’s like.

(And thanks for the pics Ashley!)

Food

The grocery store is probably the biggest challenge I’ve faced yet since being in Japan.  First of all, there is the obvious language barrier.  Everything is written in Japanese, usually in kanji (meaning that even if I know how to pronounce a food in Japanese, I won’t be able to read it).  And even when there is some kana that I can try to interpret, Japanese advertising specialists love to use stylized fonts which are all but beyond my abilities to decipher.  And the best thing of all: packaging.  If all else fails, most packages have pictures on the outside showing the contents.  This only helps sometimes though.  For example, some instant miso soup (pictured right).  Looks just like the package.  On the other hand, I thought this package might contain some dried tofu:

Bouillion cubes, not tofu

Inside the dashi box.

Outside the box of dashi.

But the language barrier isn’t the only hard thing about groceries.  No more American ingredients.  At least, they aren’t nearly as common or prevalent here as they are back home.  Not only am I shopping in a foreign language, I am shopping for foods that I don’t know how to cook.  Even if I could read the labels, I wouldn’t know what to do with most of it.  Sure, there’s simple stuff like eggs and vegies and stuff that cook the same all over the world, but that gets boring pretty quick.  And there are a lot of fun flavors here that I want to experiment with.  Lucky for me there’s this thing called the internet and it has things called cooking blogs.  I found this one last week and made some Kitsune Udon. MMM.  But that meant an extra trip to the grocery store to find some mystery ingredients: negi (long onion), dashi (soup stock), narutomaki (just google it), and inariage (sweet fried tofu pouch).  The dashi proved the most difficult.  The blog describes dashi as coming in small teabag-like pouches.  You steep the dashi in boiling water for a few minutes, remove the pouch, and you have some stock ready for soup.  Well, at the grocery store I eventually had an employee show me where to find dashi.  I found what looked like the best deal there, and bought a kilo of the stuff.  Once I got back to the house I opened it up and found not a box full of teabag-like pouches, but a bag of powder.  Hmm.  After some more research, I found out that I had bought instant dashi; just mix it in with some boiling water and pow, soup stock.  Apparently it isn’t as great as the other type, but it does basically the same thing.  The udon turned out pretty good, I think, and it was really easy to make.   

I’m sure I will have many more food adventures over here.  And I’m starting to get familiar with the grocery store down the street too.  Any good (easy) Japanese recipes will be much appreciated.

Happy Birthday to ME

I’ve only ever had to celebrate my birthday outside my home country three times.  All three of those times happened in Japan, and only one of them do I actually remember.  Last week I turned 24.  One of my coworkers told a few students at school that it was my birthday, and by the end of second period it seemed like the whole school knew.  So every time I stepped out into the hall or saw a student I got a “Happy Birthday!” in passing.  A lot of the students wanted to know how old I was, so I turned the situation around and gave them a chance to practice some of their own English: “How old do you think I am?” or “Guess!” were two expressions most students were fairly unfamiliar with, but they all picked up on it sooner or later.  Three different times students started singing happy birthday to me in the hall, and one group actually made it through the whole song.  The rest of the week students continued to wish me congratulations.  Keep in mind there are around 450 students at my school; it almost felt like they were waiting to ambush me with a “Happy Birthday!” by Friday. 

Another birthday surprise was a visit from my Uncle Steve.  He just happened to be in Japan on a business trip and was able to take time to stop by Funehiki for dinner one night.  It was great to get a chance to celebrate with family.  I don’t know when I’ll have another out of town visitor, but I look forward to it.  It’s always nice to see a familiar face.

I also celebrated a bit with the other Wakakusa teachers here.  They made what is probably the coolest birthday card ever for me:

Place meat here ^^, and enjoy.

Friday night they surprised me with a trip to Koriyama to have dinner at a yaki-niku restaurant called V-Brian.  We didn’t go there just because the place was obviously named after me; the food was amazing too.  The waiters placed a few mini charcoal grills on the table and then brought plate after plate of delicious raw meat.  Yaki-niku is pretty easy: grab whatever meat you want, put it on the grill until it reaches your desired doneness, and enjoy.  And it was all you can eat.  I think I ate enough meat for a month.  V-Brian – definitely not vegetarian friendly. 

I’m still getting used to life over here, but the adjustment is going well.  This place doesn’t quite feel like home yet (I don’t know if it ever will, really), but I’m getting used to the notion that I’ll be here for a while.  And if things keep going the way they’ve been going, I don’t think I’ve got much to worry about.

Streets and Squares

This past weekend I took a trip to Sendai and got a small taste of what life looks like outside rural Japan.  So forgive me if this post becomes something of a ramble, but here are a few things I noticed in comparing villages and cities in Japan.

Life in Funehiki is pretty calm.  Until a few years ago, Funehiki was its own entity, a small village among other neighboring small villages.  Funehiki still feels like a small village, but now it is technically a district of Tamura City.  Tamura was formed when Funehiki and four other villages decided to combine into one municipality.  So even though I technically live in a city of 40,000 (still a small city, but twice the size of my hometown of Ashland, OH) it still has the feeling of a small village.  There are two shopping centers within walking distance of where I live, so shopping for groceries and other general household needs is pretty easy.  Not much in the way of entertainment exists in town.  But four years of living in the middle of nowhere Western New York (aka Houghton) taught me lots of ways to find diversion when the locale is less than bustling.  They tend to roll up the sidewalks here just after sundown (which is pretty early here, compared to the states).  I’ve found one cheap diner open 24 hours, but that is definitely the exception to business in Tamura. 

I’m not that far away from diversion, if I ever feel so inclined.  The city of Koriyama is only a 30-minute train ride away, and a round trip ticket only costs about $10.  I haven’t done too much exploring in Koriyama yet, but I have made it to a couple of malls.  Book stores, coffee shops, international food stores, music shops, gyms, and even a bigger and better version of Dave and Buster’s can all be found within a 20 minute walk of the train station.  Koriyama is by no means a big city; it feels about the same size as Buffalo (my last city of residence) with a population of just over 300,000. 

That's a bowl of tail soup, fyi.

This past weekend I got my first taste of a big Japanese city: Sendai.  Lots and lots of people.  I think this was the first time I really got a chance I got to see other foreigners out and about since I’ve been here.  Meeting a stranger that doesn’t speak Japanese is rare in in Funehiki and Koriyama even, but I heard people speaking all sorts of languages in Sendai.  Sendai has just over one million residents, and the streets are wide and always full of people.  This past weekend was a holiday weekend too, so I probably experienced the city at an especially busy time.   

Moo.

 Sendai is known for its cow tongue, so I made a point to give it a try.  It was good, but still weird.  Isn’t it strange that eating other bits of a cow doesn’t give me the slightest pause, but when I start chewing a tongue I wonder why I’m not a vegetarian?  Anyway, tongue will not become part of my regular diet, but I would definitely get it again if I ever return to Sendai.  

One of the few places you can't be on a bike in Sendai.

Another difference in the big city was bikes.  In Tamura and Koriyama, bikes are not too common.  Sure, there are designated bike parking areas at the grocery stores, but they are always pretty empty, at least when I’m there.  This was not the case in Sendai.  Bikes are everywhere, which is a little strange because the streets are not bike friendly in the least.  In fact, bikes aren’t even allowed on the big streets and have to be ridden on sidewalks, which make for pretty slow biking because of the crowds of pedestrians.  But still you see bikes parked everywhere, and even small underground parking areas with special ramps for bikes.  But wherever you see a bike parked, there is usually no more security on it than a simple wheel lock.  This brings me to a similarity between cities and villages in Japan, and one of the biggest differences between Japan and the States.  Japan is very very safe.  I was told this before I got here, but wow.  It took two nights in Buffalo before we learned the hard way that you need a super heavy-duty lock if you are going to keep your bike on the porch overnight.  I wouldn’t ever leave my bike alone without securing it to something sturdy with a big U-lock.  But now I live in a town of 40,000 with a security force comprising of four unarmed police officers.  Of course, the police forces in Koriyama and Sendai are a little bigger than that, but the cities still feel just as safe. 

I look forward to getting to travel throughout Japan and get a better sense of the differences between rural and urban life here, but I still have plenty to learn about life in little Funehiki yet.  It will be interesting to look back after I’ve been here a while and see if my initial impressions were at all accurate to how things really work.