Today was the first day teaching classes with the textbooks. I got to Nozaki sensei’s place a little early because I figured there would be a lot of prep work to do today. Actually, she and her family were all home, which surprised me. There was a little family emergency false alarm last night, so Nozaki sensei and her husband both took the day off today.

Anyway, Nozaki sensei was there to help me prep for classes, and I had a little extra time before the students arrived so we walked around the neighborhood to introduce me and let everyone know not to panic if there is a foreign guy entering her home.

Nozaki sensei had purchased some little cheesecakes for the occasion. We went to each place, said hello and explained what was going on, and then handed over the present and said goodbye. The reactions of her neighbors were very positive. One lady said that she would be glad to have a foreigner around the neighborhood (whatever that meant). One house had just a college aged daughter home at the time, so we introduced ourselves to her and she smiled and looked at me like I was an appetizer on a plate.

One particular custom in Japan that is interesting to me is giving gifts. Nozaki sensei had bought the cheesecakes, and so when I saw that she had did that I said that it was such a big thing to do and she shouldn’t go to all the trouble. Then, when we walked around giving the gifts, the recipients of the gifts would say that it was way too much and actually appear to refuse the gift. Of course, you can’t let them refuse, and in order to get them to take the gift you tell them that the gift is nothing – very small, and not so delicious. That puts me in the unusual postion of belittling the gift that I recently had said was too much. It all depends on where you are on the respect scale at the moment.

Here’s a gift that my boss just bought for everyone, and here I am, in front of my boss, saying that it is really nothing at all and not even worth mentioning. The trick is to be as humble as possible, far past the point of personal comfort.

As for my classes, they went pretty well. With the textbook the students had a little more structure to their lesson. It was kind of nice, actually – before I would look up at the clock and see too much time left. Now I saw that there was not enough time.

After work I came home and cooked up some of the food that we got from Kuniko’s parents, and then did an hour of studying kanji before hitting the sack. I received a schedule from Nozaki sensei for my holidays this year, so tomorrow I want to check that out. It looks pretty good, though.

Sunday was a rare day off for Kuniko, so we spent the day doing whatever she wanted to do. We studied, played video games, cooked, relaxed, and generally took it easy.

In the evening we went over to Kuniko’s folks place for dinner. We brought along a lot of food that we had bought at Osho, and they also had prepared a lot of food. Kuniko’s mom had made kimchee/octopus fried rice, sashimi, and takenoko tempura. It was the first time for me to eat takenoko tempura, and it was really good. But I’m a fan of just about anything fried. So in the end, there were piles of food everywhere, and lots of cold beer to drink. The biggest challenge was deciding what to eat.

Kuniko’s dad was settling into his favorite TV show, Taiga Drama, so we decided to make our move and get out of there. We came back home early because we both had some things to get ready for Monday, and a nice hot bath at the end of the day really capped off a relaxing day.

Tomorrow my students will start in on their classes with their new textbooks. They arrived on Friday, so I’ll be forcing them to actually learn some English instead of just playing games, which is what we’ve been doing the last two weeks. I’m looking forward to seeing their reaction.

Elections in Japan can be noisy. But there is hope. Change is coming, but it will take a long time before it will quiet down around election time.

In Okubo they wait until after 9 a.m. before turning on the noise machines. After nine, the streets are constantly ringing with the sound of someone in a huge voice repeating “Please vote for me!” ten times and “Sorry about the noise!” once.

When I got Okubo station last night after midnight, a campaigning official wearing the standard “beauty contestant sash” stood at the gates with five of his supporters lined up on either side as swarms of tired, hungover people came out. They bowed, asked for our support in tired monotone, then repeated. My first thought was “tell me why I should vote for you… don’t just bow and wave and hope I remember your name!” But then I remembered.

I don’t get a vote here.

Flagpole Sitta

I woke up this morning with a mild headache and a stuffy nose. I guess that the cold is progressing along nicely. Kuniko had to go in to work, so I got up and took a shower, and then wandered over to Saty for some shopping. It was a little unnerving walking through the shopping center with most of the stores still closed. It felt like an abandoned building.

On my way back I bumped into all three of the owners of the three stores on the first story of my building. There is an interesting contrast between the three.

The first store is the bakery. When we first moved in to this place, we parked our car temporarily in one of the bakery spots while we unloaded. The owner of the bakery wrote a note and stuck it to our windshield saying “move your car!” We went in that day and apologized and bought some cakes, but ever since then he’s been really grouchy. He never smiles – even when I see him from a distance working in there he looks miserable. Just not a happy guy. So, we don’t buy cakes there – we just go somewhere else. I’d like to buy stuff there – it’s close and convenient.

The next store is the florist, and this guy knows customer service. He always greets us with a smile, throws in a few free flowers, and chats and enjoys our shopping visits. It’s a pleasure to shop there and I’ve never bought flowers anywhere else since we’ve moved in.

The last store is a hair salon – it’s like a Los Angeles-themed place. There’s hip-hop music playing, lots of American stuff all over as decorations. The owner (I think) is a young guy and his wife/girlfriend. I see them around town sometimes, and they always stare at me but never really say anything. I’d like to chat with them, but I don’t really need hair salon services so there isn’t really much opportunity.

Not much going on, so I’m going to take it easy today and just rest up and get healthy for next week.

Friday afternoon I taught just two classes, and then headed to the train station. I did a little back and forth trick to catch the fastest train, and ended up sitting at the bar at the Belgian beer place an hour and ten minutes after my last class ended. That wasn’t so bad, really.

Since I woke up in the morning I have had a tickle in my throat – the sign of an oncoming cold. Not sure why I’ve become so cold-prone in Japan, but that’s the breaks. I had already made plans to meet Antoine, so I figured I should just plow through and hope for the best.

Antoine and I sat at the bar and had three or four rounds of drinks, talking about his new job (going good), his girlfriend (going not-so-good), and about my job (going really good).

We walked all over Kobe to find some dinner, and ended up going to an old favorite that we hadn’t visited in years – Like Like. It was full of salarymen, and we took the last two seats at the bar – right in the middle of the salarymen.

As it happened these guys were drunk enough to want to speak English, so we talked with everyone almost exclusively in English. The master of the place had his two daughters working there, and they kept giving cute smiles to the salarymen – these guys were in love. So Antoine and I chatted with a salaryman on either side of us, and pretty much just used English. One guy had lived in Toronto for five years and he had awesome English. I talked hockey with him for a while.

We had some interesting food for dinner – kimchee pilaf, taco pizza, and fried chicken. The taco pizza was pretty spicy but almost Mexican – I liked it. A little greasy, but that’s the kind of food you get in heavy drinking establishments like Like Like.

Around 11:30 we got organized and got out of there. It was good timing – Antoine was talking casually with a completely drunk salaryman who was bragging about his sword collection. Time to go…

I caught a train and got home around 12:30 – Kuniko was sleeping so I just slipped into bed and conked right out. Kuniko has been pretty tired out lately, so I want her to get as much rest as possible. Working her homeroom class has been pretty tough lately.

I spent part of today fighting with all kinds of fun stuff like Blogger, PHP, Gallery 2, and quirky stuff like cURL calls and readfile() code. In the end, I won the war, but lost a few good things along the way.

Anyway, the result is the pictures you see over on the right side of the site. They are some random images from the pictures that I’ve posted in the website gallery, so just click on them to go see bigger versions.

The bad news is that there may still be little bugs and problems with the site, especially with the archived pages. Also, if your bookmark isn’t set to http://bryan.fredricks.net/log/ then you’re not seeing this, for one thing, and probably staring at a blank white page wondering what the hell is going on. Sorry – I’ll work on these things a little bit at a time and I hope that Blogger gets its act together and solves the problems on their end.

I’m off to work and then dinner with Antoine. More news later…

Yesterday I had time to do a little shopping in the morning, and then I came back and got ready for work. By the time I was ready to leave for work, it was starting to rain. Since I walk pretty much all the way to work, I grabbed an umbrella and headed out the door.

I had my usual set of three classes, and then a junior high class in the evening. The first three classes went pretty well – the students in those classes are still kind of getting used to me, but we’re getting close to starting with our textbooks, and that will give them a little bit of structure to work with.

My first class on Wednesday is going to be a little bit of a challenge. The students need a lot of discipline to stay on task – even if being on task just means sitting in one place. One boy likes to try to sneak up behind me for the “kancho”. The girls were having a minor drama session because the new girl was allowed to sit where someone’s former best-friend was sitting and that caused a big issue.

Other than that class it was no sweat. After the first three classes, I just had the junior high class to teach. This was with new students, so I was looking forward to meeting. Nozaki sensei made a mistake and told me that they’d be in at 7:30, but in fact they came at 7. No problem, sit on down and learn some English. I was a little surprised to find that these students were third year junior high students – everyone was much old than I expected. One standout from that class was Haruka – she had excellent pronunciation and I would guess that she has spent time in a foreign country.

After the class ended Nozaki sensei said that one of the mothers was outside in a car and heading to the station, so I could catch a ride with her. I gathered up my stuff and jumped in a car with a stranger, and she drove me five minutes to the station. On the way we talked about her experiences as a host mother for a French girl who insisted on eating only French bread and Evian water during her 10 days in Japan.

When I got home Kuniko was already there – all tuckered out underneath the kotatsu. I made up some udon noodles for dinner with ponzu and egg, and then finished up some studies and went to bed. Tomorrow is a normal three class day, and then an easy Friday at work and a meetup with Antoine Friday night.

I got up early with Kuniko this morning and spent the morning doing the usual household chores and enjoying all the extra time getting up at 5:30 a.m. affords me.

While working on the computer I stumbled on something and after about an hour downloading and another hour configuring little text configuration files and arranging things in the right place, I have a little piece of nostalgia running on my computer.

Probably not many people reading this site will know or remember, but when I was young I was big into video games. I remember going to arcades and marveling at all the new ones. I remember playing in arcades upstairs in Pismo Beach, playing Pacman for the first time (in the Sonoma A&W) and crying because I lost without understanding how it worked. I liked video games so much that when I got the chance, in high school I went out and bought two giant full-sized video games. My parents were nice enough to let me set them up in the den, and (for a little while) I lived out my arcade fantasy at home.

Now I’m playing one of the games that I had so many years ago at home on my laptop computer here in Japan. Using an emulator and some downloaded movie files (from a shady source) I’m able to play my old favorite, Space Ace.

I had another game, Red Baron, which I’m able to play with another emulator (MAME). Now I can replay those games in the comfort of my living room again, but this time on my little laptop. I don’t mind playing on a smaller screen – but it was a lot of fun to have the full cabinet, the paint job on the side, and to play with all the settings inside to avoid having to put in quarters.

Playing Space Ace again is really cool – I don’t remember as much as I thought I would. Some parts are burned into my brain, but near the end it’s really like playing it new again.

So now you know how I spent most of my day on Tuesday. Eventually I did go to work, and had three classes plus a junior high school class.

It’s only my second Tuesday teaching, but I think I’m going to like my Tuesday classes best. The toughest part of Tuesday is the first class – the youngest students. One student arrived with his grandmother a full half hour before the class started, so I had to be the bad cop and tell them (politely) to come back later. Finally everyone came on time, and we had a very active class. The youngest student, Yuzuha, really tries hard to speak English, and she’s good at mimicking what I say. The other students are getting less shy and within a month will be singing songs like drunken pirates.

Kento, the boy who cried through the last lesson, didn’t cry this time, but spent most of the lesson sitting on his grandmother’s lap in the back of the class. She didn’t really spend much time trying to help Kento get involved, so I talked to him a lot and tried to get him to participate. He’s still just too shy.

The next two classes are really fun. One class had just three girls and one boy in it. The three girls arrived first, and when I told them that one new boy was coming, they were ready to lock the door to prevent it. I felt sorry for the boy, but he’s a little older and able to handle it.

Also I had a junior high class, and this was my second time teaching these students. We are starting with a textbook, and I made up some activities and introduced some parts of the text early on in the lesson. Then, I taught them how to shake hands and do a proper greeting. Next week I’ll greet them at the door and see if they remember…

In the last ten minutes of the class I told them to put away the books so that we could play a couple games of hangman. The mood of the classroom shifted, everyone relaxed, and people started to really think hard about how to say and spell words. It was a noticeable difference from when we were working on the textbook.

On the way home from school I stopped in a restaurant to get a bowl of ramen (yum!) and then came home and played a little Wii tennis to kill time until Kuniko got back. She ended up coming home late from a dinner party she had with two of her coworkers, so I met her at the station at 12:30. I didn’t mind – I can sleep in tomorrow.

Monday morning Kuniko and I were both pretty tired from the weekend. Only one of us had the luxury of sleeping in, though. Kuniko went off to work, and the best I could do to say goodbye was to wave from my bed. What a lazy bum…

During the day I ran some errands around town. I stopped at the local bank to deposit some money that we got from Tomoko to pay for her ticket to Hawaii. The line for the ATMs was pretty long, but I really had no choice but to wait.

I could write volumes about my opinion on Japanese banks. To sum it up, I think they are old fashioned, inefficient, and a rip-off. Remind me to revisit the subject sometime and I will more fully vent my frustration.

After about 10 minutes of waiting I deposited the money, and then took care of some other things on the way home. Once I got back I cleaned and did some studying, had a leisurely lunch (Kuniko is bringing a bento to work, and so she leaves me my portion on plate for my lunch), and then around 2 o’clock I walked down to the train station and caught the train for Higashi Kakogawa.

One thing I didn’t know before I started working here was that there is a college nearby. On my way to work I walk past lots of college students, and in the last week I bumped into four or five students that are my former students from Takasago. They look different, especially the girls, since they can’t wear makeup in high school. When they get to college they go makeup crazy, and they looked like L.A. streetwalkers when I saw them the other day.

At the classroom Nozaki sensei had left some notes for the classes this week and some paperwork to deal with, so I took care of that and then settled into my first three classes. This was the second time for the students, and they are incrementally adapting to me teaching the classes.

One of my students in the first class discovered a little bug walking around amid the namecards for all the classes. She and the other students freaked out with giggles and “ewwwwww” comments, but one little girl, Kako, saw this as an opportunity. She ran up to where the namecards were, searched out the little silverfish-looking bug, and smashed it with her thumb. She looked at me with triumph and I handed her a tissue and sent her in to wash her hands. Kako is a little off, but in a good way. She’s really smart and knows a lot of English. She sometimes starts speaking in English without prompting and for no apparent reason. Other students look at her with a mixture of curiousity and awe. I encourage her behavior, but I didn’t know she was an exterminator as well. Cool.

I also had a junior high school class tonight. This class was completely different from the other one that I had taught last week. Two girls were scared so completely that they never smiled during the whole lesson. Everybody just needed to relax, and upon later reflection I think I should have done some more ice breaker activities. One girl and one boy in that class show some promise of loosening up, but these two girls are going to be tough. Please, just smile and relax!

After class I met with Nozaki sensei. Today was payday. She didn’t have time to go to the bank to wire me the money, so she just gave me an envelope full of cash. She calculated all the students, and was surprised to find out how much money she owed me. I had done the calculations before when considering the job, so I was ready but maybe she didn’t realize just what it added up to. I wanted to make sure she was still cool with the deal, but it was no problem.

Walking back home with all that cash in my pocket, I still can’t believe what I am getting paid versus what I am actually doing. It’s a little more money that what I was getting at my last job for working all day. Kuniko and I were talking about it later, and her feelings on my new job are that, number one, she is jealous that I have a job that has so much free time, and number two, impressed that I managed to find it. I am close to falling into the zurui category again…

Kuniko made dinner for me tonight – a giant (giant!) om-rice that really hit the spot. Coupled with a glass of white wine it really turned out great. Since we both worked late tonight we both went to bed on the late side, but it was a good Monday.

Sunday we went back over to Kuniko’s parents’ for dinner and to get a recap of the big lunch event. Tomoko’s boyfriend (or should I say fiance?) Yamaoko-san, was there. He looked exhausted and maybe a little drunk from the experience and the all the beer. He’s a really nice guy, once he relaxes a little bit. I talked a little bit with him, but it turned out to be kind of one-sided so I let him off the hook.

As for the big lunch I guess it went pretty well. Everyone seemed cool with how things went, and there were no embarrassing moments that I heard about. Mission accomplished!

Kuniko’s mom went shopping and brought back lots of food. I helped by cooking some mini-steaks that she had bought, and Kuniko did lots of organizing and preparing in the kitchen.

I opened up a can of beer, and we got Yamaoka-san to drink some, too. It was nice to gather around the table full of food and have what felt like a big family dinner. We ate big (Kuniko and I didn’t have a big lunch, so we were a little hungrier than the rest.

It was a nice night – we left early to give Tomoko and Yamaoka-san a chance to get an early start driving home. On our way home we stopped at Ito Yokado so Kuniko could do some shopping for her homeroom class. I went over and visited Yasu working in the music store, and then we headed home from there. It was a nice weekend, but tomorrow is back to work.

Saturday and Sunday were pretty laid back, actually. In fact it turned out that we went over to Kuniko’s parents’ place for dinner both nights.

The first night was to help Kuniko’s dad set up his new computer. He’s a pretty methodical guy, and he had highlighted all the steps he needed to take. Which buttons to push, when to check the checkboxes and when to uncheck them – everything was written down and highlighted in his manual. Thanks to that, it really was a pretty simple task and we had it done in about an hour.

One cheesy thing that I noticed was that the new computer was full of advertisements – unsuspecting new computer owners would sit there and stare at ads running right on your desktop without knowing any better. I turned them off, but who knows what will pop up once he connects the computer to the internet.

Another reason that we were there was to meet up with Kuniko’s sister Tomoko. She was there to spend the night and then her parents and her boyfriend and his parents were meeting for lunch somewhere to introduce each other. Late in the evening after dinner Tomoko invited Kuniko and I to join her for an hour of karaoke. I’m not big on karaoke, but the last time I declined I ended up sitting around Kuniko’s parents’ house for almost two hours while they went out and had fun. It was pretty boring last time, so I said I would go this time.

However, Kuniko uninvited me – so I had to sit around the house anyway. I guess I could understand why she did that… she wanted to spend some alone time with her sister and chat about her big meeting the next day. So they left, and I sat around with Kuniko’s parents and we talked about computers, watched TV, I studied some Japanese, I read a paper, watched Kuniko’s mom do her hair in the living room, and then after two and a half hours they came back.

Tomoko broke out some wedding planning materials for Kuniko to look over, and I realized that this was how she was kind of pre-announcing it to her parents. They saw the brochures, and then Tomoko kind of explained that the purpose of the meal tomorrow was to announce a wedding. Interesting approach. I could tell her folks were surprised, but I’m sure they had an inkling about this.

Anyway, from what I gathered that night the wedding is going to be on December 1st of this year. I’m looking forward to it!

Friday after school I came home and beat Kuniko back. For some reason I felt like celebrating the end of my first week at school, so I sent a message to Kuniko to see if she was up for a glass of wine from the little Italian restaurant across the street. She said yes, so we were all set and ready to go. Then, the night took a turn for the worse.

When Kuniko got home we found that we had misunderstood each other – Kuniko had thought that I was going to go across the street to the restaurant, buy a bottle of wine, and then bring it back to drink at home. She was OK to head over to the restaurant, however. When we got there the tiny place already had four people sitting at the bar working on their dinner. There was only one guy working at the restaurant, and he spent the whole time trying to catch up in the kitchen so it took a long time to order. They didn’t sell wine by the glass (what kind of place is this?) so we settled on a half bottle (which just meant he filled a carafe from the bottle… why not just go by the glass in that case?). The wine was pretty good – a Chianti Classico.

So the root of the problem is this – I had imagined coming home, taking Kuniko over to the restaurant across the street and sipping some wine and leisurely chatting about our week. Maybe order a small pizza and a salad, and enjoy a slow paced evening out, right across the street from our house. When we were in France and Italy the cafe culture was really nice – I guess I wanted to get a taste of it again.

But, here I was at the bar – Kuniko had her head propped up in her hands trying to stay awake, the wine list has boiled down to one choice because I know better than to spend $60 for a bottle of Chianti, and we can’t order any food because the guy is stuck back in the kitchen.

I know what you are saying… Wow Bryan, your life sucks.

Yes, I know, I know. I’m writing this just to illustrate what can happen when you imagine an ideal situation and then expect it to happen, just because that’s what you want. I’ve got to learn to be a little more ready for bumps in the road. We are in Japan, after all, and the waiter doesn’t really have any idea what I wanted to get out of my dining experience.

Eventually we ordered a pizza and the cheese plate, and it was pretty good. The cheese plate was too expensive for what we got, so we decided to head over to Jusco after dinner and do some cheese shopping – cut out the middle man!

One advantage of living near this supermarket is that the customers are mainy really old fashioned traditional Japanese. It is a chain, so they get the same products all the other Jusco supermarkets get, but the people that shop there aren’t interested in California Pinot Noir or brie or Camembert or salsa. All of these things arrive at the store from the main distribution plant, and they sit there until Kuniko or I buy them. So, we swooped in there and scored some tasty food and brought it back home. We opened up a bottle of wine and had a much better experience lounging around our living room.

Sometimes I do get the urge to go out and enjoy great service and good wine, but I guess I’ve yet to find the right place. For now, it’s right at home.

Thursday was three more classes full of new students eager for a look at the new teacher. All three classes were fun – the students today didn’t seem shy at all.

One thing I’ve learned early on is to keep my lesson plans flexible. Today I had a class with four boys, and they loved playing “I Spy”. They caught on really quick, and before long they were each trying to pick things out for the rest of us to guess. We must have played for almost half an hour.

Another thing I’m learning is that the students don’t mind repetition – even though I think maybe they are losing interest in a game, actually they are just gathering steam and getting comfortable with it.

My last class went really well – the students were really interested in my picture album. They pored over the pictures, and one girl pointed at almost everything just to hear my English explanation.

Usually I don’t get any feedback from the students – they sit through the lesson, participate, speak some English, and then at the end they stream out the door. Today I followed them outside to get some fresh air and was around when all the students met their moms who came by to pick them up. The students were all saying how much fun it was, and how they liked English – it was right out of a commercial or something.

This evening Kuniko and I had some veggies and rice for dinner, and then stayed up a little late watching TV and reading. I had to stay up to answer an email from the mother of one of my students. She had forgotten to send her son to the class today, and wanted to know what to do about it. I’m pretty new at the job, so not only did I not know which student and what class he was in, I had to guess at the name because the kanji was really hard to read. Then I spent a lot of time writing a very polite email in Japanese and sent it back. It was serious crunchtime for my Japanese skills. I got a nice message back from her, so I guess I did OK. Or she’s just really polite.

Tomorrow is Friday and I have only two classes – the early class is an open slot right now – it might get filled later on. I’m going to head in a little later for work.