So what was the result? What did I learn and what happened upon returning to Portland after a year of living in Sapporo? Let’s make a bullet-list!

• Portlanders/Americans are noisy (うるさい) and friendly.

I had gotten accustomed to the Japanese tendency to keep to yourself. Just going from the airport to the Hollywood district I had 7 people talk to me, and only 3 wanted money. One of the guys asking for money even had a friendly conversation with me after I said no. It was both jarring and welcome. I gave a couple people directions. There I was, carrying enormous amounts of luggage and sweaty-dirty from 36 hours of travel and I was giving people directions. I used to live in the Hollywood district, y’know?

It took about 5 days for me to become my old noisy American self again. I’m glad I did, because I’ve managed to keep some of that coming back here again. Now that I can speak Japanese relatively well and I know the lay of the land, I find it’s easier to be whoever I am. If people are confused or seem not to like it, now I can understand what they’re saying or talk to them about what’s happening. I find that the people around me aren’t put out by my behavior nearly as often as many of us foreign residents seem to think they are.

• Japan really is more expensive.

I made a budget for my stay in Portland and actually couldn’t spend my daily entertainment allowance. So I spent it on more clothes, which is good ’cause I need them.

In Sapporo, a can of high-quality beer at the grocery store is about 500 yen (~$5). A beer in Portland that is several times as good costs about $1.30. Coffee is pretty much the same equation. And it’s not just my vices that are cheaper. You can get many more fruits and veggies for much cheaper in Oregon (note that I live in Japan’s most major agricultural prefecture.) And mass transit — oh, man. A subway ride in Sapporo is based on number of stops. It’s at least 200 yen (~$2) and goes up to about 340 yen. My usual ride is about 240 yen. And that’s each way. In Portland, you can ride around the main city area for about 3 hours for something like $1.80.

However… in Sapporo I can go somewhere with amazing service and have them bring unlimited alcoholic beverages for 90-120 minutes for usually around $15. In many of these places I can also get wonderful sashimi that is unrivaled at home for just a few bucks. You can also get a tasty bowl of perfectly healthy ramen for about the price of a very unhealthy meal at McDonald’s, et al. In fact, Japanese food, speaking generally, seems to be of higher quality and nutritional content. So there are trade-offs. But Japan is certainly more expensive.

• I can kinda speak Japanese.

I knew before I left that I had reached a threshold of ability that qualifies as “speaking Japanese.” But when I was travelling, I found that I had no trouble navigating airports, train stations, etc. — places I hadn’t been before. I could speak to people who needed to talk to me. In general, I had no trouble making my around Japan. So from my door in Sapporo to Jesse’s door in Portland, I had no significant difficulty with language differences. It was pretty rad.

• It really helps to be reminded who you are.

As much as I am learning to fit in here, I will still be defined in many contexts by what I’m not, that being Japanese. It can be really easy to get caught up in the idea that what I am is a foreigner. I can run around calling myself a “gaijin” and generally reinforcing my outsiderness by behaving as if all that really matters is that I don’t get punished for what I do. It can be pretty easy to fall into that pattern. I’ve been quite vigilant about not doing that as I’ve lived here, but occasionally it can feel a bit oppresive when I’m not feeling like the society where I live agrees with my assertion of non-outsiderness. Going home and being myself in my home environment for a couple weeks really helped reset the “self settings” in my mind. Combine that with the fact that this time coming to Japan I can actually communicate and navigate in this society and I find myself being much more, well, myself this summer. Being vigilant about my refusal to make myself into an outsider feels much more natural and simple at this point. I hope to get my Japanese skills up to a more Chatty Cathy kind of level so I can strengthen relationships with my coworkers, too.

• I like having multiple cultural perspectives

I’ve learned a ton about me and the world just by living in a very different country from my own. Going home helped me realized what I had learned in the past year. It’s immense. It’s just really, truly mind-bogglingly immense. It’s like I’m 2 years old again and every day is so full of learning that it verges on painful (and sometimes more than verges.) This includes the obvious stuff like Japanese language and cultural norms. I’ve also learned more about language and norms in the countries where my fellow ALTs come from. But the real kicker is in the synthesis of this all. We get a lot of worldy info from the Internet. But as much as the info is real and useful, the experience is not really very real. Industrial science has yet to create a replacement for experiences. The experiences I have here so often force me into the Piagean crisis where I have to reconcile things I don’t understand and find some way to synthesize the new info. And I know that technically happens all the time. But for me it happens in that difficult 2-year-old way a lot. It’s tough. But now I’m really revelling in the learning it’s given me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

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!

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!

The above pic and these following ones are of Gonense Ichikumi (5th grade, class #1) at Shinoro Elementary.

Their teacher is buried in this picture, too. Can you spot her?

Boys act pretty much the same the world over…

I got to eat lunch with these kids. The girl on the right was very helpful in getting me sorted. It struck me that women in Japan take a lot of responsibility for helping guests. This girl acted very much like adult women do in taking on the social responsibility of helping me know what’s what (social responsibility is big here — I’ll likely talk at length about it in a future post.)

Some of the 4th graders I visited the day before I got the camera out.

After Shinoro Elementary, I visited Ainosato Nishi Elementary. The cuteness continued…

I got to teach the kids about Duck Duck Goose, which they thoroughly enjoyed. This is sankumi (class #3) playing. Ichikumi (Class #1) created their own version where they played inside the circle. Instead of running around in a simple chase, the goose would get up and immediately beeline for the other kid, who had to dodge around the goose and make a dive for the empty spot. It was more like a game of football than Duck Duck Goose but they were really into it!

Some first-graders come over to say hi in the gym.

I got a whole bunch of shots like these. And yes, they pretty much all had the “V” thing going on.

While at Ainosato, I learned a couple interesting things about measurements. The school lobby has these huge examples of typical world measurements painted onto the main support pillars:

These pillars have meters and yards. I’ve always tended to estimate them to be about the same, but this simple display shows clearly that they diverge pretty quickly. The other side is the cool side, though:

The symbol on the left pillar is not an “R”, it’s the kanji character “尺” (しゃく, [shaku]). A shaku is the old unit of basic length measurement in Japan. It was the average length between knots on a stick of bamboo. Looking at this picture, you can easily see that one shaku is very close in length to one foot. I thought that was totally cool.