You can see the first part here.
Nel really rolled out the red carpet in the morning. He was up before me to heat up the bath and make breakfast. Pretty soon it was time to roll out so he saw me off at the bus stop and I headed back to the train station. Hopefully Kuniko and I will be able to come back soon and spend more time with Nel and his family.
The ride back was pretty uneventful, and I was able to remember all the right transfers and stops. I got to the seminar five minutes after it started, but that wasn’t bad considering the distance I traveled through an unfamiliar city.
The speakers during the second day weren’t quite as good as the first day, with the exception of one guy that is famous enough to have written a lot of books and have his own Nintendo DS games. His name was Hideo Kageyama (no relation to my wife) and rather than speaking about English he used his time to discuss the ongoing discussion about whether to go back to a six day school week for Japanese students. He asked the audience whether they were for or against the idea, and I was surprised to see it stand at about half and half. Kageyama sensei kept his speech in pretty neutral territory, but ended up giving a lot of facts comparing Japanese students and their scores with students in other countries. I got the impression that he was against the idea of going back to Saturday school, and instead wanted to look at some other ways to attack the problem of falling academic aptitude.
There was an interesting talk by a lady that had been born and raised in America by Japanese parents, and then moved back to Japan in her 20’s and got married to a Japanese guy and started raising a family. She offered to do her speech in English or Japanese, but ended up mostly using Japanese despite the call from the audience to use English. She had lots of good ideas, and from the English I heard it seemed like it was the language she was more confident in. Every once in a while she would forget a Japanese word (even some words that I knew) and that was interesting to see her work around the holes in her languages. At the end of her presentation she lost a few cards she wanted to use to illustrate a teaching technique, and that brought the presentation to a grinding halt while she looked around for them. Embarrassing.
At the lunchbreak she was talking to Nozaki sensei and when I walked up Nozaki sensei introduced me. She gave me a scary look and asked me what I taught. After thinking a second to try to figure out if this was a trick question, I told her English. She turned bright red and the other teachers laughed. Did I just unintentionally embarrass someone? She asked me what I thought of her Japanese, and again, I had to think a bit to see if there was some hidden meaning. I smiled and told her that I was probably not the most qualified person in the room to comment on her Japanese skills, but I thought her English was superb. She gave me a weird look and left. Nozaki sensei couldn’t figure out what her issue was, and we were puzzling over it the rest of the trip.
During the lunchbreak a lot of the other teachers saw it as a last chance to chat with me, so I spent almost the whole time talking with other teachers, and then it was time to do the second half of the conference. The teachers here did a pretty good job, and I really enjoyed a talk by an older Japanese lady that has been married to an Australian guy for the last 30 years. Her opening theme was to Japanese people to look beyond their borders and experience the world around them. I was struck by this theme, and afterward went up to talk a little with her about it. I started the conversation in English (since she’s an English teacher and has been married to a native English speaker for 30 years) but I was surprised when she stuck to Japanese and avoided English.
Finally the conference wrapped up, and saying goodbye to a lot of people I joined Nozaki sensei and Miki sensei who were waiting for me down in the lobby. We caught a local train from Shinjuku to Tokyo station with about 30 minutes to spare before the shinkansen train back to Nishi Akashi. That gave us lots of time to do some omiyage shopping and to buy some ekiben (駅å¼) for the ride home.
Ekiben is kind of a new thing for me – I don’t ride the shinkansen much. Eki means station, and ben is from the word bentou (å¼å½“), meaning a box of food you buy at the station. Japan is a train society, and each station in Japan is renown for various local delicacies available in ekiben form. A train from Hokkaido might specialize in crab or ikura ekiben, and trains from Akashi have specialties involving octopus. I was surprised to find out that since Tokyo is the center of Japan, there isn’t a particular specialty available. I ended up getting a chinese style ekiben with shumai, fried chicken, fried rice, and a vegetable stir fry. Together with our omiyage we lugged everything onto the shinkansen, relaxed and took off. Goodbye Tokyo!
The ride back again was confortable and we enjoyed eating the ekiben while watching the scenery fly by. We got home around 10 p.m., and Nozaki sensei and Miki sensei took connecting trains from Nishi Akashi while I met Kuniko in the parking lot right there. It was good to see her, and I was glad to come home and relax after walking all over Tokyo.
