Sad News

Written April 23, 2008

Before my first class of this week on Monday, the Japanese teacher of English notified me that one of our students was not going to be in class. She said that his father was in a car accident and was in the hospital. Kyoto-sensei (vice principal in Japan) explained that the accident involved the car leaving the road and entering the sea.

Tuesday morning, the news was not good. Both the JTE and Kyoto-sensei told me that the student’s father had died Monday. He was 51. My student is 14.

The funeral was held Tuesday afternoon and I was not asked to attend. I had no complaints, as I would have understood very little of any proceedings, the atmosphere would have been very heavy, and while I know the kid, I think there are much better ways for me to be involved with him.

All of us in Higashi hope he’s doing as well as he can.

More Daily – A week, really

Written April 18, 2008

It’s the end of the week here at Higashi School and it’s been a really good one. This was my first visit here since the start of the new school year (they start in April, I assume for a reason having to do with the nature of seasons – spring is fresh, a rebirth. Based solely on the size of Higashi School (116 students in all nine grades), I am always a little busier than at the other two schools. It’s not tough, but the extra lessons I need to plan and the chance of a last minute schedule change make my days more volatile.

But this week has been awesome. Classes have gone well at all levels. The elementary classes have been fun (2^nd grade was so crazy and loud!) and the junior high school classes have been better than I expected. The junior high kids, as they proceed through puberty, tend not to be as enthusiastic as the elementary students. I suppose it’s natural, but it bothered me quite a bit when I first got here. I remember not being able to get any response from the 8^th graders then, wondering what the hell was wrong (they have since become 9^th graders and our first class was, given my previous experience with them, really good!).

勝利の喜び - The Joy of Victory

Written April 14, 2008.

I’ve been meaning to post photos and a description of the day I had last Tuesday. I’ll spare getting it to the details until I get that next post up (it’s in the works right now!)

But today, yes, today was a great day. It was simple, yet wonderful.

Having ordered a picture dictionary from Amazon, they attempted to make the delivery on Tuesday. I wasn’t at home, so they left a notice of attempted delivery. The form indicated that I could call them to make alternate appointments (i.e. deliver the goods to school), but since I have to pay for calls from my phone and speaking & listening on the phone might be the most difficult thing at the moment for me to do, I decided to write a note instead and leave it on the mailbox.

It said, 「東学校で働いてますから、職員室に届いてお願いします。」, meaning “I’m working at Higashi school (today), so please deliver (the package) to the teacher’s room.”

It worked and I got my dictionary. While this represents a triumph in portrayal of a message, I can’t speak fully as to its grammatical accuracy. I’m sure there’s a better (read “right”) way to say it, but I got what I wanted without any problems (on my end at least).

Yay for Japanese!

More Daily - A Sunday

The title of this article, More Daily, is a stupid phrase I just came up with. I suppose it could refer to what some of you might be thinking, along the lines of, "He should post more often, perhaps daily?" I have taken that thought, removed the chaff, and given you a title representing what will most likely not happen (sorry!).

But I have decided to take the camera with me, more often, close to daily. Today I was rewarded with gorgeous weather! and I took the opportunity to try and capture that feeling. April 6th, 2008, spent in a polo shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops. No complaints.

Rising early (6:30, remember?), got some studying done, laundry, eating. Met up with Justin & Cliff (Cameron was in town so he came on his new bike) at an awesome hill...er, mountain?...top restaurant called Chi-papa. The view was amazing. And the food was good (thin slices of grilled meat with onion on top of a bowl of rice).
We met to continue planning our trip to Tibet. What? Yeah, that's right. Finally publicly announced, we are teaming up for a three-week summer vacation that will include trips to places like Hong Kong; Chengdu (located in the western province of Szechuan, China); Lhasa, Tibet; with a 3-4 day hike thrown in there as well. I won't bore you with planning details, but I'll be sure to give more up-to-date information as we get closer and closer (for those of you fearing the unrest in Tibet, we've got a backup plan that should more than suffice - this includes a 5-day horse festival in western China that will be a first for all of us). Also, Brother, you need not worry. I'll be back in plenty of time to meet you and explore Okinawa for a few weeks.

After we got the basics down, I met up with Elina and we took a walk on a beach I only found out about last week during the new teacher tour (one more reason why coming in April would make a lot of sense - eight months of info "taken for granted" is finally being revealed!). It was awesome. It's wide, clean, and the water stays quite shallow for a good distance. The wind was refreshing, the water cold, the sun warming. I'm definitely going back to camp.

Resistance

I've been enacting a practice of waking up at 6:30 every morning. This follows the practice of not going to bed until I feel sleepy. It's been working really well, with a maximum delay in rousing of about 15 minutes. So, I was up again before the village music broadcasts, studying, eating, and organizing, all before 8:00 - which is when I decided to put my futon away and hang up a pair of jeans from the previous day.

I put away the futon without any problem. But when I went to open the sliding door where my clothes hang, I got some resistance. I pushed harder, but the resistance was still there. I thought perhaps the door had caught on some fabric from the inside of the closet (this has happened before), so I checked all around the lower parts of the door. Only after I looked up did I discover what was causing the friction: a gecko.

The sliding doors are designed to fit inside a deep groove at the top, resting on a slick material on the bottom, allowing for pretty silent and efficient use. To fit in the deep top groove, the door has what I would describe as "guides," thin, spaced sheets of metal that extend to fill the deep groove, keeping the door on track. Now, imagine thin, metal guides set in a deep groove, moving rapidly over the body of a trapped gecko. You now have an image of what I saw this morning.

Once I became aware of what was happening, I stopped moving the door. I stepped back and went to get a paper towel. Before I removed the door to extract the little beasts body, I found parts of his tail that had been severed and fallen to the ground. I picked them up then removed the door from its frame. His body fell to the tatami with soft plop, small amounts of blood present. I bent down to see how bad he was. Very. His body was mangled, heart and other organs protruding from his chest and abdomen. Most disturbing of all, parts of his body were moving slowly yet erratically. I picked him up, wrapped in the paper towel, and put an end to it all. He stopped moving.

While I'm not one to participate in ceremony, I just didn't feel right throwing him in the burnable garbage. Bodily incineration doesn't bother me (cremation, if you will), but surrounded by a bagful of trash, which might not leave my house for several weeks? So I took him out back, scooped a little dirt from the area I'm trying to cultivate as an azalea garden, and placed him in the earth. I came back inside to put the door back and wipe the tatami. I found a few remnants, mostly tail, and discarded them as well.

I remember hearing that geckos are 家の神様 ie no kamisama "gods of the house." Hopefully, the accidental destruction of one of their kind doesn't bring about any sort of retribution.