I’m a home alone bachelor these next few days because Kuniko is off at åˆå®¿ until Wednesday. Monday I walked her to the station in the morning, and sent her off to two whole days with the tennis team. Have fun!
I had a relatively quiet morning studying, doing laundry, and reading a little bit of the new Harry Potter book. It was kind of cloudy today, so it kept things relatively cool.
I left for work a little early, and bumped into a crowd of ex-students on the way home from college. They had a little Bryan-cheering-section going on, and I just waved and kept moving. The other people walking around did a double-take trying to figure what the big deal was.
My classes went OK, but my younger kids today were in a weird mood. I was explaining a picture from the textbook and acting out the part of two kids. I said, “Hello, my name is Matt” pointing at the little picture of Matt introducing himself. Then I played the part of Meg, and pointed at the picture of the little girl saying the same thing. That set off some of the students in calling me an okama, the Japanese slang word for “gay”.
In Japan homosexuality is repressed to the point of invisibility in rural areas, and pretty rare to see outside of Osaka or Tokyo. Because of this, there are a lot of misconceptions, and that’s partly why a bunch of seven year old kids thought it was funny to call me that. I just smiled and ignored it, but apparently this was this was humor at the highest level, and they kept it up the rest of the class. I was a little peeved, not for being called an okama but for not knowing how to deal with it appropriately. We’ll see if it is still going on next week, and if so I’ll deal with it then.
The rest of the day went smoothly. I had an evening class with Yuka. It is the last class before she leaves for New York, so I helped her with some last minute questions and English expressions. She’s going to do just fine in America – her skills are pretty good. She’ll pick up a lot of vocabulary there as well. Her mom has some unrealistic expectations, though. She was saying that she expected her to absolutely pass the next text level after spending 10 days with a host family in New York. I tried to lower her expectations a little, but I’m not sure if it worked.
The evening was quiet without Kuniko around. I did some reading for school and stayed cool in the living room. Tomorrow I have my challenging little kids class, but Miki sensei will be coming back to sit in on the class and maybe help me get these little munchkins under control.
