It’s the morning after a holiday, and most of Japan is going off to work while I spend the day here at home pondering my future. With the heavy lifting done for my degree now it is just a matter of figuring out what kind of job I can land starting next April. An hour of surfing the internet found some interesting jobs out there. Right now 90% of the teacher jobs posted are for positions starting immediately teaching kindergarten or elementary school level. While I have no problem teaching at that level, I wouldn’t have much of a chance to use my advanced degree, and I do feel like I need more of a challenge – I don’t want to get bored right away. I’ll keep up the search and see what happens.

As I said, yesterday was a holiday, and while Kuniko was working at a school event I was hiking with Yoshi (one of my students from Kawasaki) and his 7 year old son Akira. We climbed the mountain behind Suma beach and then looped around in a three hour circle. At one point while we sat eating some snacks on the trail an old guy came walking up and started a conversation – he learned English in India, and it was interesting to chat with him and hear his heavily accented Indian English mixed with his Japanese accent.

Afterwards we had lunch at a newly opened Danish hot dog place in front of Suma station. It was run by the same guy that ran a similar place in Takasago that I had visited before. I guess Takasago pretty much dried up and he moved to greener pastures. It seemed to me he was doing a pretty good business there.

During the hike I had gotten a “missed call” on my cellphone, but it didn’t log the name of the caller – possibly because I was out of range up in the mountains. When Kuniko got home that night she said that she had tried to call. It turns out that the event that she was doing at her school was like a bazaar for all the volunteer and international clubs in the area. They had lots of food booths selling foreign foods like Chinese steamed buns, Brazilian sausages, and Japanese traditional sweets. She wanted to invite me over to enjoy some of the food so I was sorry that I missed the call. She also said that some of the girls from one of the schools were from Brazil, and they put on the samba outfits and were doing traditional dancing that opened up a lot of eyes among the staff. Like I said, I was very sorry to miss that call.

This week is an easier week for me. I have the regular classes on Wednesday and Friday at Kobe University, and then a night class Friday night at Sanyo. Sanyo was recently acquired (or is soon to be acquired) by Panasonic, so it’ll be interesting to hear what those guys think about that.

Yesterday I turned in my last paper for grad school, and now it is just a matter of waiting around for the professors to mark them, and then waiting around for graduation day. Everything now is out of my control, so in that sense things feel over.

In the meantime I have a day off today before a busy Friday tomorrow. In addition to my usual three courses at Kobe University I’m starting to teach a new course at Sanyo electronics in Kobe. So for the next month or so I’ll have three hours to kill in Kobe every Friday afternoon.

Actually I have a couple of other classes starting in November, taking the places of Mitsubishi-Caterpillar and Kawasaki. I’m looking forward to getting busy again in the evenings, and I should have more time during the day to look for a full time job in April, study Japanese, and do research projects.

The weekend is a long one, so I’m hoping to do a little hiking and enjoy a couple of days off. The weather has cooled off quite a bit, so it is perfect for tackling the mountains in Suma.

This month is a pretty busy one for me. Along with some new classes starting I have two final projects due for my graduate work, and on top of that some other events on the weekend to keep me running around.

Last weekend Kuniko and I had two sessions with the architect, in a bid to move along the process a little faster. The guy is getting used to us and our style of making decisions – so he’s fun to hang out with now. He’s definitely lightened up a lot. We’ll go back this Friday night to talk about the kitchen, the colors inside and outside the house, and after this session it might just be one or two more times before our decisions are over.

Last night I had dinner with a group of my students from Mitsuboshi Belting. They will have a four-week grammar course taught by a Japanese teacher, so I have a month off from that class. They wanted to do a party to celebrate the end of part one, so we went out to an izakaya and hung out. It is fun to hang out with the younger crowd – they are really friendly and excited about learning English.

Well, I’m off to Kobe to teach three lessons at the university. The next few weeks will be pretty busy, but after November things should slow down a bit for the holidays.

Yesterday was my first day working at Kobe University. I’m teaching a two month special course on making technical presentations in English. I’ll be teaching six classes a week at two of the Kobe University campuses. The classes are small to give students more opportunity to speak, and almost all the students are either medical students or doctors working on graduate/research work.

The first day went pretty well. I taught in two different places, the Okurayama campus in western Kobe and the Rokko campus perched near the top of Rokko mountain in the east. Most of my classes are at Okurayama, and the staff there were extremely helpful. They really took care of anything that came up – they made copies for me, faxed materials and looked up my next destination on the internet. They even assigned a woman from the staff room to have lunch with me and show me how the cafeteria works.

The classes themselves went smoothly. The first class was a little tough because the department head and the staffing company’s boss watched the whole lesson from the back. The students were a little quiet at first, but warmed up later despite having an intimidating audience watching them from the back of the room. After the class ended the department head said that he thought the class went really well, and wished me good luck with the rest of the course. The other classes were not observed, so I guess I passed the test on now I’m on my own.

The Rokko campus is quite large. I took a combination of subway, train and bus to get there, and once on campus the classroom was easy enough to find. My contact at that campus was pretty nervous, and just wanted me to do whatever it is I do so that he could get back to the safety of his desk. Only two students (out of five) showed up yesterday, so I did an abbreviated version of the lesson and I think I’ll have to do pretty much the same thing next week. The nervous guy signed the papers and said thanks, and then I was out the door. I caught a rapid train that skips several of the usual stops and got home in record time.

I’ll teach three more classes at Okurayama tomorrow, so my work week has expanded quite a bit. The pay isn’t great for the Kobe University lessons, but I’m in this to make contacts and gain experience (and bragging rights), so no big deal. I’m on the hunt for something full time in April 2009 – so far only one promising lead, but I haven’t heard anything back yet.

Monday I had my usual Kawasaki class, and only three of the six students showed up. Two were on business trips, and the other was being forced into overtime work by his boss. The small class size made for a good lesson – I really enjoyed getting to chat more with the students.

After class I joined one of my students, Yoshi, for dinner at a local okonomiyaki place. We had a giant seafood okonomiyaki (lots of squid and octopus baked inside along with the odd piece of pork) and also some yakisoba. For a skinny guy, Yoshi had a big appetite. The place is a quiet little locals place where your pull your own beer from the fridge because the owner is too busy cooking. I got back home after 10 p.m. – Kuniko had already made it back, and was relaxing and watching TV. It is a rare night that Kuniko beats me home.

After we invited Yoshi and his family over for a taco dinner several months back apparently they have been making a lot of mexican food at home. His wife was made the tortillas by hand, and they have managed to source all the ingredients. Yoshi’s six year old son Akira is a tough food critic – he is always checking to make sure that all the ingredients are there. Anyway, they are mexican food converts now – I’ll keep on building a foundation of customers for Taco Bell whenever they decide to show up over here.

We had another busy weekend – Friday night Antoine and I went drinking, Saturday was a very successful episode at the architect’s office, and then Sunday Kuniko had to work, but we squeezed in a visit to IKEA after work to get our interior decorating imaginations going.

I met up with Antoine Friday night after he got off work, and we spent the evening bouncing around between bars we knew and bars we didn’t, and ended up finally at the New York, across the street from the train station. Kuniko met up with us just before the last train, and we all managed to get home safely. It was a fun night – Antoine is doing lots of planning for his wedding, as well as thinking about the future a lot more. It’s a slightly different side to him.

At the architect’s office on Saturday we dragged in there slightly hungover, but he didn’t seem to mind. We finalized a floorplan – he sketched it out on graph paper and next week we’ll see the cleaned up version. Now that this stage is complete we’ll need to start thinking about windows, lights, and electricity.

Our visit to IKEA last night included a trip to the restaurant – my first experience eating at IKEA (other than hot dogs). The food was better than I expected, and we probably ate a bit too much. We found a couple things we really liked, so we’ll keep them in mind for the future. I’m excited about getting some bookshelves for one of the bedrooms. I’ve got lots of books in our apartment – some on cheesy bookshelves in the bedroom and some in boxes packed away out of sight. It’ll be good to stash them away somewhere accessible.

That’s about it for the weekend – I’ll try to update a little more often this week. I’m going to teach my first classes at Kobe University, so I’m looking forward to that experience on Wednesday and Friday.

Even though it has been on my “to do” list for years, it wasn’t until last week that I finally got around to downloading the first season of “The Amazing Race”. It is pretty old – a scene of the New York skyline still had the World Trade Center towers standing, so it was filmed well before I came to Japan.

After watching a few episodes, I’m really impressed. I’m guessing that probably everyone that reads this blog is more familiar with the show than I am, so I don’t think I need to describe the premise.

I think I like it because it plays into one of my childhood dreams of going to an airport, and just buying a ticket somewhere and flying off. I am also a big Survivor fan, because I like watching how people react to stressful situations. The Amazing Race so far is like 80% stressful situations – throwing these teams into foreign and strange environments and watching how they deal with it. And like an American teacher I know at Shin-Cat says, the players are so annoying. As the stress gets to them they begin shouting at African people in English, which never works out too well.

Also the idea of pulling into a foreign airport and trying to find your way to some unknown destination tends to remind me of some of our overseas travel adventures. I envy the players the experience, but also feel bad for them that they only get to see most of the world while running like hell through the streets with a giant backpack on.

Now I have thirteen seasons of the Amazing Race to catch up on (which will be a very slow process), but I’m hoping that it continues to hold on to my attention the way that the first few episodes have. Great show!

The weather here has turned wet and a little sticky thanks to some leftover summer heat, and the border between summer and autumn has blurred a bit more. Kuniko had an epic workday yesterday, getting home after midnight (!) and heading off for more work at six a.m. today. As for me, I’m plugging away at my assignments and also dedicating a little bit more daily time to landing a big job in April.

I am taking advantage of my Japanese skills and searching for jobs on Japanese newspapers and web sites. This process takes an excruciating amount of time and often ends up with a sudden surprise – I spent 15 minutes deciphering a technical ad yesterday only to find out that they wanted a Japanese woman to fill the job. Doh! However, my speed is improving, and it gives me a (small) advantage over other job seekers that don’t have the Japanese skills.

Today I teach my last class of the week at Mitsubishi Shin-Caterpillar. Tomorrow I have the day off and I am meeting up with Inoguchi sensei at the local yakitori. It has been a long time since we’ve been able to hang out.

Kuniko and I will go over to a realtor’s place on Sunday and possibly pull the trigger on some property in Okubo that we like. Okubo is looking more and more like the best area to live because of the degree in which it is built up (the huge shopping center to the south pretty much anchors the entire town), the station is a rapid train station rather than a super-rapid station, and the price point is close to our sweet spot. Places farther east (towards Kobe and Osaka) would come with less train commuting time, but also with a higher price tag, smaller properties, and more noise.

Kuniko bought some books the other day so we can study up on the process, what things to look out for, etc, etc. Of course they are in Japanese – suddenly all those years of study while sitting at my desk at Takanan are paying off.

I’m back home from teaching at Shin-Cat and sipping some Spanish merlot while waiting for Kuniko to get back home. It’s another late night for her, and so I’m just chilling out until she gets here.

On my way out the door at Mitsubishi Shin-Caterpillar a guy I didn’t even know mentioned that a typhoon was coming tomorrow, and to be careful. I asked some of the other teachers on the bus ride back and they all said the same thing – typhoon approaching so batten down the hatches.

Anytime a typhoon is coming, total strangers will come out of the woodwork and tell me about it. It is as if they are worried that I might not know about it otherwise (as in tonight’s case) and they really want to make sure I am not caught off guard. This is one of the reasons that I love living in Japan – people treat foreigners really well and look out for them.

So tomorrow I have no classes, and if the typhoon doesn’t change course it’ll arrive tomorrow evening. It will be nice to be around to tie everything down if it is a rough one.

A sample from today’s studies:

System morphemes include infections and most function words; they are defined by the features [- thematic role receiver/assigner] and often [+ quantification]. As such, they contrast with content morphemes, which either receive thematic roles (most nouns and adjectives) or assign them (most verbs, some prepositions) thematic roles. The other language(s) participating in code switching (CS) is the Embedded Language(s) (EL).

The ML frames the projection of the complementizer (CP) which constitutes intrasentential CS. (A CP is synonymous with a clause with a complementizer (COMP) e.g., because he came late, with because as COMP). Note that COMP is often null (e.g., in a main clause) and a CP may contain many null elements.

Under the Matrix Language Frame model (MLF model), within the CP frame there can be three types of constituents, all of which are maximal projections within X-bar theory (e.g., N’, NP, PP): (1) Mixed constituents (ML + EL constituents) contain content morphemes from both the ML and the EL, but have a grammatical frame from the ML. This means that all syntactically active system morphemes come only from the ML. (2) Similarly, ML islands have an ML grammatical frame, but differ in that all morphemes come from the ML. (3) In parallel fashion, EL islands consist of only morphemes from the EL which are framed by the EL grammar.

No wonder it takes me two hours to read 20 pages of this stuff. I had no idea I’d have to learn another language (academia-speak) in this course…

Yesterday I answered the Denya master’s call and joined the volleyball team for a tournament held in Okubo. This time I brought Kuniko along to play/watch/cheer. I missed the tournament last year for some reason, but it was pretty much the same format, except that there were more teams participating in the lowest skill bracket. Because of that, we had to spend a long time waiting around for our turn on the court. It was nice to give us a chance to catch up with the Denya regulars, and joke around a little bit. We did get to meet a new part time worker at Denya who was there to help – he was a really nice kid. His father and younger sister were also there.

Kuniko ended up having to go in to work before our games started, so she missed the slaughter. As usual, the Denya team sucked pretty hard. This time I noticed that none of our members seemed to mind, and some of my old drinking buddies were joking with the other team and having a good time. I think in four games we scored maybe 15 points – it takes 21 points to win one game, so you can see how we did. The other teams made certain to keep the ball away from me, worried that I was some kind of foreign volleyball ringer or something. So, I didn’t have much to do but intimidate the people facing me at the net, and jump and try to block whenever I could.

The second team we played was an all girl team that had heard my name somewhere and so kept talking about me during the game. Lots of giggling and laughter, so I checked to make sure my fly was zipped. After they destroyed us we lined up as teams and bowed to each other, and then met at center court to shake hands. I was gloating to one of the Denya guys that I had a line of girls waiting to shake my hand.

After we were swept off the courts we had to be line judges and scorers for one match, and then we headed out. I cleaned up at home and then later Kuniko drove me to Denya to meet up with some of the team and have dinner and drinks to celebrate the experience. We ended up going to a yakiniku/Okinawa restaurant down the street from Denya (I don’t blame the master for wanting to get out of the office for the evening). The food was pretty good, and I had some new dishes (pigs feet and pig ear) as well as some pretty weird looking meats to grill. We had way too much to drink, and then I staggered to the station and eventually got home in one piece.

Today I don’t really have a hangover, but I am sore from all the jumping, blocking and running around on the court. It’ll take a few days to get over it I think.

First, after a significant amount of down time I decided to reinstall a freeware instant messenger, so if you are into that sort of thing you can find me on Yahoo IM under the username: bfredricks_99

I’m usually home most of the day, so I thought it might be good to get it set up again. Let me know if you use a different instant messenger service and I’ll try to get it working! As (some of) my students say, “let’s chatting!”

Today I took a trip to Osaka to meet with the head of human resources for the staffing company I work for, OTC. She wanted to meet me face to face to talk about full time work in the future – and whether it would be right for me or not. The conversation went pretty well, and I learned a lot about full time workers at the company. Even though you are considered a full time worker you don’t get health and pension insurance (which might be a show-stopper right there). The big benefit is a minimum guaranteed salary, which although low is a steady income source. Another benefit is that I wouldn’t need to go to Osaka every day – I would stay in the area and teach. They would try to keep me as busy as possible, but other teachers in the area have reported only teaching 18-20 hours a week, which is pretty light.

The downsides are plenty – if you aren’t teaching you are essentially “on call” from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., so you can’t really do much with the free time that you might have. As well as not paying for insurance the company only gives you 6 paid days off a year, and those must be arranged months in advance to avoid inconveniencing clients. Also there are five teachers in the Kobe area already, and it sounds like they aren’t so busy, so right now it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to add me to the mix. In mid-January OTC will poll all their employees to see who will stay on and who will head home (there is a significant turnover rate) and based on that there might be some openings. But the HR lady seemed to think I could make a whole lot more money finding some steady day job that ends at a normal time and then padding my salary with OTC part time work. She’s probably right.

Just as the conversation ended she added that I was one of the most popular teachers they’ve had – lots of great feedback from the companies that I visit and also the Japanese staff at OTC really look forward to my office visits. She mentioned that now and then they have “in-house” positions, and because I speak Japanese and have a lot of experience I might be eligible for that position. I would work based out of the Osaka office, but the pay is much higher, I would do training of other teachers, and be the “go-to gaijin”. I’ve met the guy in this role and I think if his situation were to change she would want me to take over. Not sure, though.

Anyway, an interesting interview. After her comments I did a lap through the office chatting with the people that I have contact with in my classes, and then hit the road.

Instead of stopping at the Hard Rock for lunch again I caught a train and headed to Kobe. I wanted to get some stuff for dinner tonight (Mexican!), and grab some lunch. The other day one of students had recommended a ramen place in Motomachi, and I went there. It was called Ippudo, and I ordered the dish my student had recommended and really enjoyed it. It has been a long time since I’ve had ramen – it was great! I didn’t have enough stomach space for a kaedama, but I did have a small order of fried rice with it. Yum.

I scored some tortillas at the import food store, but ended up also buying some beer (Anchor Steam, Bia Hanoi, 333), and jalapeno stuffed olives (not as good as the ones in the jar from Sonoma but they’ll do). Then it was home to get the freshies for the rest of dinner.

I’m sipping the Anchor Steam now and getting ready to start dinner. Can’t wait to eat way too many tacos.