The longer I live in Japan, the more I get used to it. The more I get used to it, the less often I have stories to tell – things that surprised me or crazy behavior that I observe. It’s only natural that living here I’ve come to expect certain behaviors, and so I think nothing of them now, but maybe when I first arrived I was flabbergasted. Sometimes, though, there are things that make me just wonder why.
For example, near our apartment there is a little station to put out your garbage. They are big on recycling in Japan – so there are certain days that you put out your burnable trash, certain days you put out your non-burnable trash, days to put out plastic bottles and aluminum cans, other days for cardboard, and other days for glass bottles. It’s quite complex, but if you have a little chart you can sort it out.
So there are little stations like this all over the place here in Japan, and so if you put the wrong garbage out on the wrong day it sits there until you walk by and notice that you screwed up, and then you take the garbage back and put it out on the right day. But maybe while you were at work that garbage was picked apart by crows, or swelled up in the heat and exploded, or started leaking vile fluids. So you leave it, and it sits out there until the proper day, smelling worse and worse. There is nobody who comes to clean that stuff up, and so it becomes smelly and ugly and it bothers everyone.
Or, maybe you put out something that the garbagemen won’t take. For example, a TV, or electronic components, or a bag of mixed recyclables and trash and non-burnable stuff like batteries. The garbage man comes, sees that it is bad news, and slaps a sticker on it that says, “Sorry, we can’t take it”. Then it sits out there. Who is going to venture back out there and take back the bag? Your neighbors might be watching – are you going to go out there and pick up the bag and show the world how ignorant you were? No way.
Near our place there is a couple bags of various things and a box full of other various things. They have stickers on them that say “Sorry, we can’t take it”. But it’s going on a month now, and who’s going to deal with it? The answer, according to everyone I ask is, nobody. It can’t sit out there forever, but it’s making pretty good progress towards that goal so far.
Anyway, every day we walk to the train station and pass these bags of crap on the street, and I wonder why they are still there in a country that prides itself on cleanliness. Maybe it’s just something that has slipped through the cleanliness cracks.
At school today we started with full-on classes after the exam, and it was very interesting for me. In the first year and the third year our classes are split in half, so there is a teacher with me and one group of students, and then another teacher handles the other half of the students in a different classroom. After the exam, they switched the teachers, so now the Japanese teachers of English are working with students for the first time. That puts me in a very unique position of knowing the students better than the teachers I am with. I’ve already built a little bit of rapport with them, and it’s fun to see the normally confident teachers off their game.
Matsunaga sensei was stunned with the behavior of the new students. She usually runs a tight ship, but her partner, Harada sensei, usually runs it pretty loose. It looks like she going to really have to work hard to whip them into shape. She seemed a little daunted by the task.
I had a good time chatting with some students between classes today. They are getting more and more confident speaking to me, and I do my best to make the conversation run smoothly, even if I have to work a little harder behind the scenes mentally. Sometimes they make mistakes, but I really try to prevent that from stopping the conversation – I try to work around words that they don’t know or concepts that they have trouble communicating. It’s a little bit of a challenge for myself, and I’m getting to the point where I can kind of figure out where students might be going with a train of thought.
Tonight Kuniko is coming home a little late – she’s got to babysit the study room students. I’m back home resting up and maybe I’ll watch a little TV tonight and work on my listening comprehension. Leftovers for dinner – and then probably right to bed. The week starts getting really busy from here on, so updates might be a little late in coming.
