Violence, Violence, Violence

Kuniko came back from school pretty stressed – she had a busy day. Her speech went really well, so I was glad to hear that. Her school has her working right up until the day we leave for our vacation, and there is a chance I might go and help her out. I’m not sure yet, though, so we’ll wait and see.

Today I had just one class in the morning, since the afternoon classes were cancelled to prepare for the big culture festival tomorrow. The class was a guest lecturer at an international understanding course. The students listened to me lecture in English, with the history teacher translating. My message was that it is a very good thing to study other cultures, and it is one of the things that have changed me profoundly. After a forty minute lecture, we opened it up to questions and answers. The only question was “Are you married?” Ouch – so much for an effective and interesting presentation. Actually, later there was a sign that at least some things sunk in.

In between classes I was walking down a hallway and saw two boy students pushing each other. One left quickly, and the other one followed yelling at him wanting to fight.

In three years at this school I’ve never seen a fight, and I always thought that was weird. I didn’t want one to start now, so despite what they tell us in Assistant Language Teacher School I stepped in and held back the kid that wanted to fight. He just tried to push forward past me, but I did the passive resistance thing and told him to head back to his class. After a few minutes I got him turned around and headed back. Later I went to the teacher in charge of the students and reported what happened in broken Japanese, so hopefully they won’t pick up where they left off later. It won’t make me popular with either of the students, but I think I did the right thing. Ask me again in a week, though.

In an interesting coincidence, Tsutsumi sensei told me that she had to break up a fight between three different groups of students. She said they were all girls, and the leaders of the groups didn’t get along. She got involved in separating them and the subsequent discipline, so she was late to our class yesterday.

Today was the last day for the student teachers, and although there is no English teacher’s class to evaluate, I dropped in on an international understanding lecture done by a young student teacher. Earlier I had walked by a class being taught by her and everybody was making “Help me I’m bored out of my mind” faces at me while her back was turned writing on the board. I was a little nervous that the class would be mind-numbing.

In fact it was quite good, and the students all stayed awake and alert throughout the class. Part of the reason might have been that the back of the class was full of VIPs like the principal and vice-principal. Anyway, the student teacher did a really good job and explained well about the United Nations and how and why Japan is not a member of the Security Council.

After that class I ran over to have lunch at the cafeteria really quick, and then met up with Miyake sensei for a quick English lesson. At 12:30 the school stopped early to get ready for the festival, and so I spent time with the ESS club and also walking around looking in on other classes preparations. I spoke a lot of English and it was good to see everyone working hard.

One of the topics I touched on during my international understanding lecture today was what things I liked about Japanese culture and things that I didn’t like. One of the things I complained about was how people tend to not greet each other while walking around. I told the story of how I have often seen people in Japan work very hard not to meet my eyes or say hello, but in America people that happen to walk by each other are more likely to be friendly and say hello.

During preparations I was walking around and walked by two of the students from the international understanding class, and they made a special point to say hello and make a greeting. At least they understood that much of my lecture.

At four o’clock we met up to take a picture of the ESS club, and then soon afterwards I went over to meet with Tsuji-san. Today was our last meeting, since she will be getting married in a couple of weeks and moving to Himeji. We decided to make a party out of it and go out with her other student, Alexis, and Alexis’ boyfriend from the USA.

Tsuji-san and I walked through a torrent of rain to get to the restaurant. We were a few minutes early, so they set us up at the table to hang out. The owner of the restaurant came out and said hello, and gave me a small ceramic plate from the local shrine as a gift.

It turns out the owner is a big fan of traveling and he really likes meeting foreigners. Alexis has been there a couple times, so he went out and bought a small Pennsylvania state flag to hang in the restaurant to make her comfortable.

We didn’t wait long before Alexis showed up with her boyfriend visiting from home, Jake. Jake was a really quiet guy but he seemed very intelligent and was still in kind of a shock stage about Japan. It was fun to watch him struggle with the sashimi platter and decide what to eat and what was too risky. He’s been in Japan for just over a week now, and he’s been sick twice in that time. There was lots of cooked food, though, so he got by just fine.

The conversation was pretty much just in English because Alexis speaks just a little bit of Japanese and Jake doesn’t speak any at all. It was a challenge for Tsuji-san, and we didn’t make it any easier for her by talking about nostalgic American cultural icons like Chutes and Ladders and Candyland. I tried to bring her into the conversation when I could, but it was pretty tough to bridge the gap between all the different backgrounds at the dinner table.

They kept bringing food and we kept eating it – loads of do-it-yourself BBQ, fish, eggplant, tamagoyaki, fried potatoes, and even big plates of tempura. When we finally got full we tried to head out the door. They told us that they had more food coming for us, but we pleaded full stomaches, and they let us slide by having us drink fresh green tea at the bar with some dessert. This was after we paid the bill – it was just a chance for them to talk to us and get to know each other better.

The master of the place was happy that he could speak to me in Japanese, and we compared notes on our visits to Texas. His whole family was working for him, and he has sent all of them to be students of Tsuji-san at some point. He feels that English is important for them to be better people.

We finally extracted ourselves from their hospitality, but not before taking home some sushi for the next day. They were really nice, and I was sad to think that I’ll be finished with the town of Takasago in a few months and won’t really be able to drop by and say hello in the future.

Even though I went out I still got home before Kuniko, and she was happy to dig into the sushi that I brought back once she made it home. We crashed out in bed exhausted. Friday is the culture festival at my school, so I’ve got something to look forward to.


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