I’m back from the conference in Tokyo, tired and glad to be home. It was a great couple of days – I learned a lot, really got a Japanese language workout, made some good contacts, and best of all I got a chance to catch up with some good friends.
Friday I went out to the shinkansen station in Nishi Akashi, and met up with Miki sensei and Nozaki sensei just minutes before our train left. Miki sensei is the teacher that was doing my job before I came along, and she went to the conference last year. I’m not sure if Nozaki sensei was footing the bill or not, but it was great that she could come along – it made it more of a three musketeers adventure.
We spent the three hour journey on the shinkansen in style and comfort. Riding the bullet train is just like an airplane, but with passengers coming and going along the way. We spent the time talking on the way, and I taught them lots of English idioms. It is sometimes hard to explain them (i.e. water under the bridge, “In your face!”), but they are really interesting for them to learn and use. Miki sensei did a really good job throughout the trip using them whenever she could.
Once we arrived in the always busy and mind boggling Tokyo station we caught the Tozai line subway and stayed on that heading east until we got to Minami Funabashi, and then met Nozaki sensei’s sister, who drove us past IKEA to her apartment complex right next to the huge American-style shopping center Lalaport. We had dinner at the shopping center at a Japanese health food restaurant (it was really good) and then came back to hang out with Nozaki sensei’s sister and her husband. They really put on the Japanese style hospitality, offering anything and everything they had, and we spent a lot of time saying “no thank you” after filling up on snacks and wine.
One interesting thing was that the husband was really easy for me to understand, compared to conversations I have in my area with older men who can be completely unintelligible. The region of Tokyo is the “standard” dialect of Japanese, and exactly the dialect I learned from my textbook and from my classes back in San Diego. I was amazed how clear everything sounded. I guess learning in the Kobe/Osaka area is learning the hard way.
We spent that night in the guest room of the complex. Apparently residents can reserve the room for visiting people (and because of the location right near Tokyo Disneyland I imagine there are a lot of guests) and so we had the rather large Japanese-style accommodations to ourselves. The second night there was a conflict with another guest so we had to seek other accommodations.
The next morning we caught the train going back into Tokyo riding right past Tokyo Disneyland. We found the seminar location in western Shinjuku, through a very beautiful park filled with the tents and camps of homeless people. There aren’t so many homeless people in Japan, but they do tend to gather into camps, especially in big cities. The police are really pretty gentle with them, and I’ve even heard that if a homeless person sets up shop for a certain amount of time in one place, they can legally stay there from then on. Don’t know if that’s a fact, a legend, or a myth, though. The camp we saw looked like it had been there for a long time, and it was pretty clean.
The seminar was put on by the franchising company that makes the learning materials for my students, and every year they gather as many teachers as possible to keep them motivated and bringing in more students (as it is in their own best interests as well). As I came in and sat down with Nozaki sensei and Miki sensei near the front of the room, a couple of things became apparent to almost everyone in the room right away.
First thing, I was the only foreign person in the room. Second, there were only three men in the room besides the owner and vice president of the company. The other 150-200 people in the room were women. As I sat down I was pretty sure I could feel the weight of all those sets of eyes on my back, and I hoped that my dry cleaner had done a good job with the suit I wore.
A quick note: the vast majority of teachers in the company are women, mainly because their husbands work, and the wives can use their proficiency and interest in English to teach younger learners and bring in income on the side, as well as a way to fill the time that they would ordinarily spend watching TV or chatting with their neighbors. The few men that I met at the seminar were coming off of failed business ventures and apparently are a sign of the recent economic hard times in Japan. I don’t know what I was a sign of.
The seminar kicked into gear and the first speaker (the president of the company) was pretty easy for me to understand. I was starting to feel better about the conference being in Japanese. The second speaker was actually an American guy who consults in Tokyo and spoke about how the teachers in the audience can retain the English they have learned. It’s a legitimate concern, because they always need to keep their skills up for their students and to provide value to the company. Also they need credibility when recruiting new students. Parents that have prospective students want to know that the English the students are learning is not broken Japanized English and so these teachers are always studying, testing and looking for opportunities to speak with native speakers of English. Can you see where this is headed?
Anyway, the American guy has been consulting in Japan for the last 30 years (!) and he spoke in lightning fast English, dropping in Japanese words now and then. Nozaki sensei (and everyone else in the room) really liked the style because he could get complex ideas across quickly. I thought the style was a little weird – how are they going to learn the hard words if you don’t use them? Still, he gave an effective presentation. Halfway through he wanted to illustrate that native speakers of English can listen to and identify lots of different sounds at high speeds, so out of the blue he asked me if I was a native speaker, and then invited me up to help him out.
If someone wasn’t aware of me before they certainly were now, and everyone knew my name after I introduced myself onstage. We did a quick exercise that was easy enough and everyone clapped and I retreated to my seat. The speaker asked me to come up again later, and do another exercise, and so by the time the lecture ended everyone knew me quite well.
I spoke a little bit with the lecturer at the break (his name was Robert Hilke) and talked about California and living in Japan. He said he’d look me up next time he was in my area, so we might catch a beer. There is probably a lot of interesting information about life in Japan locked up in his head – a couple of cold beers might be what I need to get the info out.
After a couple more lectures we had an hour to kill before the evening reception/party, so I split off from Nozaki sensei and Miki sensei, and walked Tokyo alone.
Saturday night in the downtown Shinjuku district of Tokyo. It was awesome. I still get chills walking down the wide urban streets with almost no one around. Even on Saturday night it was pretty quiet. I walked around between these huge skyscrapers and through underground walkways and shopping centers, stopping here and there to enjoy the scenery. It was exactly the same area where I stayed when I first came to Japan in 2003 – I walked past the Keio plaza hotel where we all stayed as brand new JET program participants, and then followed my own four year old footsteps to an old Kinko’s where I first blogged about Japan.
After walking around being all æ‡ã‹ã—ã„ I found my way back to the seminar hall and joined the other teachers going inside. They had a standing buffet style thing set up, and lots of beer and wine for everyone to drink. After the big toast everyone started eating and drinking, and I got a chance to meet a lot of people. The company president pulled me aside and talked with me in English, and after that I just kind of switched back and forth between the two languages depending on the confidence of whoever I was talking to. Lots of people were curious about me, and it felt pretty weird to scan a room full of women and have most of them scanning you right back. As more and more alcohol flowed I stayed pretty close to Nozaki sensei and Miki sensei, who acted as kind of gatekeepers for me, and that helped a lot. Seriously, I haven’t felt like this for a long time.
Despite the precautions I still had a handful of business cards and e-mails, an invitation to join a group of pretty wild looking women on a midnight trip to the Roppongi hills for drinking and pictures, and women waiting in the wings with bottles of booze to try and fill up my glass. The more they drank the less inhibitions they had, and the more courage to try out their English with a native speaker. Yikes.
My whole agenda for the party was to try to make an appearance and get out early, because I was planning on staying the night with Nel all the way back in Chiba. As it worked out I didn’t get out as early as I hoped, and it took a rather spirited game of rock-scissors-paper in the front of the room for me to sneak out with my luggage out the back door.
After a 45 minute ride back to Chiba I got off at the Urayasu station and met Nel. It has been a long time since I’ve seen Nel and he looked good. We caught a bus to get to his place, and then I got to see his wife Kiyomi again and meet his new baby girl Amellie. Check out the pictures in the gallery. Amellie was so cute – and once she initially got over the shock of a new person in their home she warmed up to me and we had a good time. Nel and Kiyomi really put out the welcome mat for me, and kept my glass full of Kiyomi’s mother’s homemade plum wine. We took lots of pictures and sat up talking for a long time, and then Kiyomi and Amellie caught a cab to stay at her sister’s place, leaving me and Nel and a big jug of plum wine to talk through the evening before finally crashing out for the night.
To be continued…
