As most people already know, Japan has a big gift giving culture. The last couple of days have been a new introduction to that culture with the arrival of several gifts for me from my students’ parents.<\/p>\n
The occasion is Chu-gen (\u00e4\u00b8\u00ad\u00e5\u2026\u0192), a celebration of the first half of the year and an expression of thanks for the help that you have provided thus far. Usually the gifts go uphill… you send the gifts to someone at a higher level than you (for example, your boss, your supervisor, your teacher, etc). This kind of gift giving doesn’t really happen at a public high school, so this year is my first time actually receiving gifts. <\/p>\n
Nozaki sensei also received some gifts, although most of them came for me since I am the one handling the day to day teaching of their children. Now I’ve got a refrigerator full of sweets thanks to my students’ parents, and some thank-you notes to write. The giving season isn’t over yet, however. <\/p>\n
We had a storm yesterday and I ended up having to slog through the rain on foot on the way to work. Luckily I had my summer jacket to keep most of the moisture off me. On the way back the rain had stopped, and that was good news for lugging lots of gifts around. <\/p>\n
My evening class was with junior high school students. I only teach them once a month, but they are really good at English. A new student named Seika has joined the class, and the dynamic has changed slightly, adding just a bit of boy-girl tension. The only boy in the class, a slightly effeminate guy named Masayoshi, asked jokingly last time if Seika had a boyfriend, and that has carried into this month with a few wistful looks and distracted responses. <\/p>\n
Kuniko had dinner ready for me when I got home, om-rice and some avocado salad that she had whipped up with the leftover avocados from the taco party. I washed it down with a cold beer and could finally relax – the night classes for this week are over!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As most people already know, Japan has a big gift giving culture. The last couple of days have been a new introduction to that culture with the arrival of several gifts for me from my students’ parents. The occasion is Chu-gen (\u00e4\u00b8\u00ad\u00e5\u2026\u0192), a celebration of the first half of the year and an expression of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-lG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}