My students this week are taking a break from the textbook and instead are learning about Thanksgiving and turkeys. In some of my classes I can tell the students are a little burnt out on the text, and I thought this would be a timely break.
Explaining Thanksgiving is a little difficult, especially to 7-10 year olds. They only slightly have a concept of Japanese holidays, most notably New Year’s Day because according to Japanese tradition they tend to receive a packet of money around that time. Also the concept of a bird the size of a turkey is pretty (ahem) hard to swallow.
At the end of the lesson we make our own turkeys using paper cut-outs of our hands as the shape of the bird and then pasting on colorful feathers. The younger students really enjoy the activity, and the older students are pretty creative. It’s a fun lesson.
When I arrived at the train station on the way home, the electronic board that details the coming and going of trains was completely black, something I have never seen before in the last four years of riding trains almost daily in Japan. An announcement over the PA system said that there had been an accident involving a passenger near Hoden station just to the west of Kakogawa. The “accident involving a passenger” is really a code phrase for “somebody jumped in front of a train”.
I’m sure I’ve written before about the remarkable amount of suicides in Japan. People tend to jump in front of trains because they are everywhere, and easily accessible, but hanging is also pretty popular, as well as the running car with the hose from the exhaust pipe. An interesting twist, in a culture where the group is the base unit of measure, suicides recently are more frequently occurring in groups, with members joining clubs on the internet with the intention of taking the final trip with a couple of co-pilots.
Anyway, the jump in front of a train method has the very un-Japanese side effect of causing a whole bunch of problems for everyone up and down the train line waiting to get to work or go home. Last night the announcement said that no trains would be running for 90 minutes, so I went to find a cab outside the station. All the cabs had been taken, so I started walking in the direction of Okubo and eventually hailed one off the road.
It cost me about 3000 yen, but I got home at a reasonable time. The trains were all jammed up at Okubo station, and everybody was waiting around for a ride home there, too. I wasn’t expecting to have to take a taxi home, so I barely had the money to cover the bill and do some shopping for dinner. I think I’m going to have to keep an emergency fund on me for the future… just in case.
