Roy Huggins Says Stuff

I think I am at the point where I can say with some comfort that I “speak Japanese.” I am not fluent, but I can speak about basic stuff pretty fluidly and I can communicate have communicated to me pretty complex things. And I am sometimes surprised by how “literate in Japanese” I am, but that’s a whole different ball of wax.

So ya, that’s cause for celebration… neh?

PS — I used to speak Spanish okay but Japanese has evicted it from the “foreign language” sections of my brain. So unfortunately I’m not really trilingual. :p

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something collecting the funny or just strange things my students have written. But I don’t have all my notes here, so I’ll tell y’all about a couple that came up today.

The first one is from the end of last year (that being last March.) The first-years (7th-graders) were doing short writing assignments. At the top, they had to write the date (and they wrote it out, including writing things like “twenty-first”) and the day of the week. So one kid who was trying very hard but wasn’t very good at spelling wrote:

Mach Seven Flyday

When I read it, it seemed so natural that I didn’t initially notice the error. I was all like “Sure, today’s the day for flying at mach 7. What could be incorrect about that?”

Today I was correcting tests and came across this sentence on the papers of several 3rd-year (9th-grader) students. BTW, 3rd-years really shouldn’t be making errors like this.

We are afraid of that bog.

So, can you guess what’s wrong with the sentence? It seems pretty good, right? A bog is a reasonable and enticingly mysterious thing to be afraid of, right? Well, it’s fine unless the correct answer is (and I know anyone who’s taught English in Japan already knows what I’m about to say) “We are afraid of this dog.” The astute reader will note that these students also managed to consistently screw up “this” vs. “that.” As often happens, I initially thought the above sentence was fine because it reads like natural English. That’s why I’m not always the best person to grade assignments.

I was just watching part of an episode of Full House that was dubbed into Japanese. Two main thoughts were present in my mind during viewing:

1. I could actually follow what was going on pretty well.
2. I felt a kind of embarrassment. Like, “Oh, no! It’s been dubbed! Now every Japanese person will be able to know what kind of crap went down on Full House!”

It was a bit alarming.

I’ve been trading some messages with my friend Maren on Facebook (of all places) and I wrote this today. I realized that this is the kind of stuff my friends like to hear about so I figured I’d paste it on my blog. This is in response to Maren asking me why the Japanese school year starts in April.

Everything here starts in April. It’s probably because Spring is associated with rebirth. The Japanese are huge on seasons. Or maybe I’m just pulling that out of my ass. I’m really not sure. But it is true that all employment contracts, the school year, etc. run from April to March. If you join a company in the middle of that then your contract runs until the following March, then you renew. But usually all new jobs start in April unless you’re in the service sector or something.

My Japanese teacher tells me that for this reason, May is a big month for depression. People are excited about the new beginnings in April and then novelty wears off and work stress sets in. Also people get sick because of the shifting weather (Electra and I both have colds right now.) It’s pretty weird for May to be a depression month, but I guess it’s true.

From the Desk of Roy Huggins

Date: May 7, 2008
To: Japan

This love of seasons thing is getting way out of hand. FYI.

Thank You,
Roy (ロイ)

————

So there’s a long-standing cultural thing here wherein the changing of seasons is constantly recognized, remarked upon, and acted upon. Right now it’s nearing the end of flower-watching (花見) season in Hokkaido. It’s kinda cool, actually. Everyone goes out to watch the flowers and get drunk and eat BBQ’d ram.

But they took away my Yebisu Red. And what’s worse is they replaced it with “The Hop”, a beer which is as terrible as its name. I thought at first that my local store was just out of the red and I was waiting for more. So I didn’t worry. But when I complained of the situation at a party last week I discovered that the masterfully crafted, wonderfully bitter-yet-smooth Yebisu Red is only a winter seasonal. I of course wondered aloud about the strange policy of only producing one’s finest product during a certain part of the year. But it was explained very clearly that the Japanese love of seasons trumps pretty much everything. Ah, well.

Pretend that 100 yen is equivalent to one dollar. That’s what everyone around here does and it works pretty well.

Now pretend that you have am embarrassing amount of debt in the United States. All of it is, of course, in US dollars. At the moment, if you’re also earning your salary in dollars, you’re pretty screwed. The dollar is so inflated that any debts you’ve collected over the last 10 years are actually way bigger than they look or than they were when you got them. This is a standard risk of taking debt, but our nation’s “activity” over the last 6-or-so years has made it far worse than normal.

Luckily for Electra and I, we’re earning yen. When we got here, you needed about 120 yen to buy a dollar. This was useful for us, since we brought a couple thousand of those with us. On Friday, when I sent money home to make payments on the aforementioned embarrassing debt, I only needed 99 yen to get me one dollar. That’s right, the yen and the dollar are now floating around equality.

But how long will that last? Probably not long. The US is reeling from years of frantically printing money to fund, well, lots of things we never really needed enough to spend well over $1billion/month. We’re also reeling from the fact that nearly all of us have far more debt than we can reasonably handle. The whole country, government included, have been spending like teenagers with a brand new high-limit college student credit card.

Japan, on the other hand, is pretty stable. A little of that change in exchange rate comes from the fact that the Bank of Japan has stopped artificially suppressing the currency’s strength (they used to do that to support the carry trade) but the majority of that effect showed up a couple months ago. This latest drop is pretty much entirely due to the fact that the rest of the financial world is tired of propping the US up and they’re trying to move away from the unstable and unreliable US dollar. They’ve finally decided that even with all the investment they have in our economy, it’s not worth throwing more and more money at us trying to keep us afloat. The US dollar used to be the international currency but it’s quickly changing to euros.

So Electra and I are lucky that for the next 1.5 years or so we’ll be paying down our debts with an advantage, instead of the huge disadvantage that everyone at home is stuck with. I’m posting this because I remember that even with the Internet right there in front of me all day, I never had this kind of perspective from my home in the US. I could see that we were headed for trouble, but I never had the concrete example of seeing the same amount of yen I sent home turn into larger and larger amounts of dollars as each month went by. I’m happy to have more money for the same amount of work, but I know that the costs are going to outweigh the benefits in the long run. I only hope that we can turn this around before we all lose our collective shirts.

So, I’ve been pretty depressed and anxious. About halfway through my elementary school visits, the outsiderness got to me and I kinda cracked. The next two months I went to one school that was a little over an hour away and then another that is more like 2 hours away. For most of December, I had to get up at 4:30am to go to work every day, including my birthday.

So I wasn’t too happy. I still drift in and out of irritation/anxiety but I’m feeling a lot better now that I’m back at my base school. The teachers there are pretty chill and it’s clear that I belong and I’m not the perpetual guest^*. I think it helps a lot that they know I won’t just be there for one month. They can depend on me to be a part of their ongoing educational plan. Also, it’s a 20-minute walk instead of a 2-hour subway/train/bus Rube-Goldberg machine of transport.

I considered very hard the idea of not recontracting as an ALT and instead starting a therapy practice here. But I realized that worries about visas and taxes, etc. would probably just make matters worse. So I’ve recontracted. I’ll be working as an ALT for another year. I just really hope that my supervisor listens to at least one of my requests. He didn’t seem super-sympathetic during our meeting, which is actually kind of odd in my experience.

I will likely start seeing a couple of clients per week, though. I just need to sort out all the weirdness about taking money to pay for my supervision, etc. My contract doesn’t allow me to work on the side, so I need to make sure they’re okay with my bookkeeping plan.

My Japanese is clearly improving and I can talk about very shallow topics with my coworkers. They often express their amazement at my growth in ability. Partly this is because Sagara-sensei did a lesson-per-day intensive with each of us over Winter Break. It was super helpful. Soon we will cover the te-form (a kind of conjugation kinda thing) and I will finally be able to string together full sentences with more than one verb! Yay!

^*A few words about the perpetual guest: there is definitely a culture of hospitality in Japan. That’s great when you’re touring and it’s great when you’re visiting friends. But it’s really frustrating to go to workplaces that constantly treat you like a guest for months on end. You start to realize that the Japanese guest mentality isn’t just hospitality, it’s also rejection from inclusion. It’s “you’re not one of us, you’re just a guest.” When you actually live and work in Japan, that gets depressing fast.

Now I should make a note, before anyone jumps on the hate-wagon, that this kind of attitude emerges from a confluence of many factors, one of which is cultural values. So be aware that there are many Japanese people in my life who don’t treat me like this nor think that I don’t belong. The teachers at my base school feel I belong as do my Japanese friends. So being back at my base school has done wonders for my mood. Also, the situation was compounded by the fact that I was at the last two schools for one month each. So the “you’re a guest” approach will definitely dominate in that situation.

It’s good to be back at a place where I’m really accepted. Also, they keep me too busy to really be worried about anything!

A couple weeks ago, Electra and I were invited to have dinner with one of the teachers I met during my first elementary school visit, Yoshino-sensei. After some talking and some phonecalls, we arranged to get together last Saturday. I expected to have a quiet dinner with Yoshino-sensei’s family in which we talk about America and Japan for a couple of hours then head home.

It wasn’t quite like that. I knew Yoshino-sensei’s daughter, who is in university and speaks pretty good English, would be joining us. What I didn’t know until I arrived, however, was that we would also be joined by Yoshino-sensei’s two sons, two teachers from Shinoro Elementary and the school’s dietician, a quirky young dude named Sugoh.

I should probably digress for a paragraph about Sugoh. When Yoshino-sensei told me that I would have my desk next to that of the school’s dietician (”the only school dietician in all of Sapporo!”) I figured I’d be sitting next to a guy who’s at least my age but likely older and wearing a suit. Instead, I met this spikey-haired young dude with hipster glasses, jeans, etc. whose English communication skills are quite strong but chooses to dramatically use his favorite English phrases whenever they can come up. I explained Roller Derby to him, and he thought it was totally awesome. There developed a small inside joke of moving past objects and declaring “one point!” It’s also worth noting that Sugoh’s name is very close in sound to the Japanese word “sugoi” (すごい), which means “amazing!” or “awesome!” This point was not lost on Electra after meeting him, either. She asked him to write his name in kanji, which he did. The kanji he used are read as “su” (す) and “go” (ご). Electra took it and drew an extra kanji at the end that causes it to be spelled as “su” (す), “go” (ご), “i” (い) or “sugoi” (すごい.) I think he really enjoyed that.

In addition to the extra guests, the dinner was absolutely amazing. Yoshino-san (there isn’t really a way to indicate “Mrs. Yoshino” in Japanese, so just remember that Mr. Yoshino is a teacher so I can conveniently call him “Yoshino-sensei”) put out a spread like you wouldn’t believe including yakitori, a yummy salad that contained sliced salmon and squid, marinated tuna sashimi, some dishes I don’t know how to identify, Japanese kim-chee, the list goes on. At first, I didn’t want any beer because I was, er, a little “ill” from the night before… but Sugoh wouldn’t let me get away with tea and I can’t look unmanly in front of all those guys, y’know. The American ambassador to Japan told us personally in a form letter that the American-Japanese relationship is extremely important. So what was I to do but drink the beer? It was a sacrifice for my country…

The night was a roaring blast. I talked to almost everyone and had a good time. Electra chatted forever with Haruka, the daughter in the family, about all kinds of stuff.

One of the two brothers, Takehiro, is about to start a Masters-level program in clinical psychology. He also majored in psych in undergrad. In fact, Yoshino-sensei is also studying clinical psychology and both have completed trainings in play therapy. We talked about the fact that psychology isn’t really known or respected in Japan (yet) and I told him a bit about how it works in The US. That was a tough conversation, though. There’s so much politics in the US psych world and it’s tough to describe things like that when neither person has a depthful knowledge of the other’s language. We did agree to get together and talk psych in English, though, so Takehiro can improve his English psych jargon — a necessary step for pretty much any clinician who isn’t already a native English speaker. I’m sure I can trade for some basic Japanese conversation time. Yay for conversation partners!

We got a whole bunch of omiage (gifts) including some traditionally packaged/made natto. There’s a side story about the natto. When I was at Shinoro, the kocho-sensei (principal) asked me if I eat natto. This is a typical conversation question asked of foreigners because most Japanese do eat natto and most foreigners really don’t like it. I expressed my distaste and told him my story about eating natto the first time (I was given some by a couple of college kids doing a sociological experiment in Tokyo — this happened immediately after arriving in Japan) and he was amused. He said he eats it for health reasons and told me I should try plugging my nose and eating it anyway. We all had a good laugh and I said that I only tried it the one time and it’s worth trying again. After that, kocho-sensei would tell other people to ask me if I eat natto and it became another small inside joke.

So Sugoh gave me some natto at the party. This stuff was wrapped in straw, which is the old way of fermenting it (I think sushi rice was developed in a similar way.) It’s still sitting on the counter waiting for me to get up the nerve. Maybe this weekend. I can’t eat it when I have to be able to work that day, right?

It didn’t just last a couple hours. It lasted over five and we only had to break it up so Electra could I could catch the last subway home. It was a wonderful evening, and hopefully we’ll get to do it again!

(sorry about the “ZOMG”, it just seemed to fit.)

October is elementary school visits month in Roy-land! This month, I go to two elementary schools per week for two days each and play with teach the kids about America and English and stuff.

It seems I spend most of my time being either thoroughly enchanted or exhausted by overwhelming energy and enthusiasm. These kids are cuuuute. They are also genki (energetic, vibrant) as all hell! The third graders seem totally content to just grab my hand (en masse) and walk around with me asking me inane questions (”eto… suki na tabemono desu ka?” [”what foods do you like?”]) and not really caring too much if I actually know enough Japanese to understand and/or respond.

They all want me to sign things. The boys pictured at left ended up with my signature on both their forearms. One fifth-grade teacher (the dude at Ainosato) had the foresight to simply sit me down at a desk and have his students line up for signatures. It was like a book signing, I swear.

Lessons are very low on the academics. I only have two days at each school and the kids won’t be studying English often enough to benefit much from a rigorous lesson. Instead, I do my self-introduction and let the kids go crazy with questions. At both schools I’ve done a quick lesson on reading time and played Simon Says in English. They get to interact with an American, get their questions answered, hear English spoken by a native speaker and learn to be comfortable with a big foreigner.

Probably the best way to really communicate this, however, is with some pictures of total cuteness. I put the majority behind a jump so as not to overload my front page. Click through to see the awesomeness!

Read the rest of this entry »

I just sorted frantically through the stuff on the ledge in my closet. I threw aside two active credit cards like expired coupons. I didn’t find what I wanted, though: an old, used bus transfer.

I was just struck for a few minutes that I’m living in a world where a thing I used throw en masse into the trash, TriMet bus transfers, are of value to me. And a bottle of Black Butte Porter is worth its weight in platinum.¹

1. Not gold, of course. Its always worth its weight in gold! [↩]