Three Months in Japan

I made the front page of the school newspaper. The photograph is me chugging a glass of thick, green tea at the school cultural festival with a student standing next to me chugging a glass of cola. The “challenge” was issued to me as soon as I walked by the small stage where all sorts of eating and drinking (non-alcoholic, of course) competitions were taking place. The quality of the picture is rough due to the cheap recycled paper it’s printed one—a type of paper popular in Japanese schools for all kinds of announcements and memos—but one can clearly recognize me with my longer-than-normal hair and slightly stiff posture (I was a bit nervous at the time with so many Nihonjin watching).

I laughed when I saw the picture and felt special for making the collage of images displaying the events of the festival. I’ve been here in Japan for three months now and only this past week have I felt like I was beginning to jive with my co-sensei. The working environment can be intense with teachers rushing around all day working hard and then staying until 7 or 8 or even later. I’m the only one who leaves before 5 and recently I’ve been staying later to help with English speech practices and also to attend some of the various club activities. Like Japanese teachers, Japanese students are at school all the time and remaining on the grounds until dinner time or later is normal. Another JET described the Japanese school as serving more of the role of the family with parents expecting teachers to help raise their children, students often feeling closer bounds with their homeroom teacher than with their parents, and teachers spending more time at work than at home. I think having me stick around later (and my constant attempts to succeed despite constant failure) has helped the other teachers see that I’m not just a slack westerner come to Japan to drink and slack off (ALTs don’t always have the best reputation).

In other exciting new, today was English movie day! What’s the first thing out of the school’s extensive English video library? “Full House”, season one! Yes, with all the countless television series and movies out there in the English world, “Full House” is the one that my school owns and uses when a teacher is absent. Some of you die hard fans of the show may remember that later on in the series, Uncle Jessey made it big in Japan with his band…not sure if this is the reason the school choose this English series or not. Anyway, I felt decently excited about watching the show (even though season one was produced back in 1990 or something) since it is a form of English media (a rarity for me) until I got to the class and learned that there would not only be Japanese subtitles on, but also full Japanese voice-overs enabled. That means no English anywhere! So I got to watch episodes 1 and 2 of “Full House” completely in Japanese. My excitement climaxed when one of the students kept pointing at the screen and saying “Justin?” every time Danny Tanner appeared. Oh geeze, all in a day’s work.

This afternoon we are cleaning up the town. I don’t really understand what’s going to happen…all I know is that everyone is meeting at the junior high school where cleaning assignments will be given out. Everyone has vanished at this point, so I guess I’ll just go with the flow and hope for the best.

Until next time. Abayo!