Right now five male comedians on TV are getting spanked by men dressed as gothic nurses if they laugh. This is the finest annual TV programme for the New Year. The New Year is far more important in Japan than Christmas, which is natural as this is not a Christian nation. So it is a bit of a surprise that this laugh-fest does not note the new year nor have a countdown. Consequently we did not notice the passage of a New Year last time round and only noticed half-an-hour late. So, we pretended we were in Korea and waited half-an-hour for the next New Year. Complicated.
The programme we are watching instead of going out and partying is called Gakinotsukaiyaarahende. Last year comedians Yamazaki and Hameda plus two friends had to pretend to be Police Officers while other comedians did their utmost best to make them laugh as much as possible. This year Hameda and Yamazaki have been joined by comedians Matsumoto, Tanaka and Endo. They are not cops this time but instead have donned the pink and navy uniforms of Japanese nurses. So now we have settled down for 4 hours of laughing and spanking... oh and we are watching TV too! (was that joke too obvious or cheesy?)
Its time to think about 2007. It was marked with high and low points as most other years. And like most other years it was a split between the first half and second half. 2007 has to be the poetry year for me. While I'd written some poems before in 2006 and had learnt haiku in 2005 this was the year when the most poems ever were written and some of them did not suck. This explosion of poetry was a direct result of joining www.writerscafe.org which at the time was a small and cosy writer's closet. Now it more resembles a degenerated facebook for bloggers and many of the people who made it special have left or have scaled back their activities.
February saw Natsumi and I's third Valentines Day. We returned to the Jacasse Italian restaurant in the Hankyu Grand Building for the second straight year. The restaurant sits on the 31st floor and offers wonderful views of Osaka (once the sun has gone down). There I gave Natsumi a ring from Folli Follie which had a tiny diamond and she gave me...umm, I will tell you when she gives me something.
As March came my third year students made to take their High School entrance exams and graduate. Taka and I rose at 5:30am to make a tour of the local train stations to bid the students good luck as they went off round the prefecture to take their tests. After 3 hours of cycling round the stations we had managed to catch most of them. At some of the stations later on we saw teachers from other schools doing the same thing but we were the only ones from our school. A few weeks later we took paid leave one afternoon to visit a high school each with some of the students to check their results. The students did really well and it was a testament to Taka's teaching skills and dedication to the students that they had improved so well.
This could bring us to a lesson I learnt about how to make yourself disliked at a school (by the other teachers). Wanting to help, being popular with the students and inspiring them, and wanting to teach real English count for little. However, if you really want to piss teachers off then show real dedication to helping students. So, for example do as Taka did and run free classes in the afternoon for students who could not afford cram schools. Taka and I attended these classes and set English challenges, sometimes other subjects, to the students so they could practice. These also included listening and composition tests. However, just before Christmas we were forced to close the classes because the other teachers felt they were unable to do such classes and were therefore jealous. We continued them outside of school but without gratitude.
This was no surprise to Taka, the teachers had tried to ruin the student's performance of "We Are The World" (which has bizarrely come on TV just as I finished writing the title - spooky). A little background, in Autumn 2006, just as I had joined the school, the students of the third year had begun to learn the guitar. Taka taught them the guitar in 3 weeks and also taught them to sing in English. It had been a fight to get permission to do this extra piece of performance for the Culture Festival. In the end we had taught them to sing the song in English and together the 120 of us had worked out the music and performance. There were 30 guitar players who had even picked up the appelagio in just 3 weeks, there were to organists, a pianist, a guy with cymbols and one with a harmonica as well as trumpet and saxophone. We had got them scarfs with their motto "Be As One" so they could hold it up at the end and the kids themselves had prepared speeches about peace.
Their reward for their effort was first billing on the schedule when most of their parents had not arrived. Then during their performance they surprised us all. Not only was their singing and music flawless but during the messages they added their own surprise ones. They complimented and thanked all of the teachers who had helped them. No students had done anything like that before. Meanwhile my attempts to get the audience to clap along with the music (which was later appreciated by the third year students when they saw it on a video) was countered by the other teachers who told all the students to ignore me. Luckily some students clapped along with the parents which added to the atmosphere. At the end the students came off the stage and ran to hug Taka and I, 120 hugs.
So came April. The best students I've taught left and so did Taka (who disliked Kashiwara so much he had to leave, after they refused to let him become a full-time qualified teacher because he ran a charity for disabled children) and so did another good teacher, Noda. They were replaced with the teacher i'd liked the least from my previous school. My year finished in isolated boredom where I got to witness teachers watching one of their number punch a student in the face (with no repercussions) then get angry when a few weeks later one of the students in the same class punched their homeroom teacher. In the end I was the only ALT in the city to not get a farewell party. I have never seen such a great bunch of students have such horrid and cold teachers.
After finishing school Natsumi and I embarked on my first return to England in 3 years. It was so good to be home! I got to indulge in all the good food that I could not eat in Japan. So, in 10 days I could enjoy such things as fruity Devonshire cheesecakes (as opposed to those dry New York things), quiches, vegetable tarts, real fish and chips, pork pies, jam doughnuts, butterbuns, muller yoghurts, walkers crisps, polos, savory cheese scones, Robinson's fruit juice, toffee crisps, double-deckers, whispers... and so much more. Everyone tells me how bad British food is but really, it is oft unfairly maligned. That said, i'm a local and am biased.
While in England Natsumi and I spent three great days wandering around London. We went on the London Eye, saw all the impressive buildings, went around Buckingham Palace (its amazing). While in the palace we noticed a typo in the Japanese where they offered an Audio Guy instead of an Audio guide. Then on the way out a Japanese lady fell over in front of me. I asked if she was ok in Japanese and she replied instinctively in Japanese. None of them remarked at my ability to speak their tongue. Did they notice? We also went around the British museum, went to a restaurant called Wagamama (means selfish in Japanese) and spent a long time shopping on Oxford Street, well I say shopping, most of it was window shopping. Oh we also ate many jacket-potatoes and cornish pasties as well as trying London sushi (served by exclusively Chinese people). After spending three years in Japan the sudden exposure to cleavage nearly killed me but somehow we survived.
We spent the rest of our holidays meeting up with my friends, touring my home town and visiting places such as Stonehenge, Chepstow Castle and Bibury. The most important trip of all was the 300-mile round trip to see my grandmother in Canterbury.
My return from England marked the beginning of life in Kishiwada after 3 years in cold-hearted Kashiwara. The first thing on the menu was my first City-wide Speech Contest. This was fun. First we spent 3 afternoons coaching the students on how to pronounce their pieces better, deliver their pieces fluidly, with the right intonation and with as much dramatic flair as possible. Luckily the students from my new school did really well and one even tied for the lead. If only I had enough brain-power to wear a suit to the main event...better luck next year. lol.
My new school turned out to be quite the opposite of the previous one and was a real culture shock. It is my smallest school yet and often verges on anarchy. It displays the utmost problems with broken families in modern Japan. The total lack of support for single-mothers which often verges on demonisation of the mothers rather than pressure on the absent fathers has produced troubled kids who see themselves as having no futures.
My troubles adjusting to the school were helped in a weird way. Pneumonia (New Moan Era) struck towards the end of October. In traditional fashion in hospitals round here the first one was too lazy to diagnose me properly. By the time we ended up at the second one I was weak, not eating and in dire trouble. The second one treated me like a co-investigator as we did x-rays and tests. As the doctor searched for the English translation of Haien I had diagnosed myself with pneumonia from the x-ray. He then sent me off to a bigger hospital who instead of treating me made me do all the same tests again to confirm the diagnosis. Meanwhile I was getting weaker and weaker. Eventually, after 2 hours, they gave me some medicine and sent me home. By the end of the illness I had been absent for 3 weeks from school and had grown a beard.
Things went well in terms of teaching. I managed to change the way we teach with the second years. The first years have also improved a lot and have been fun to teach. I barely get to see the third years. Here the teachers have been great and kind. At the end of the year the baseball team helped us teachers clear the school grounds of fallen trees and bamboo. It was an epic undertaking but our teamwork pulled us through. Also my annual Christmas Wordsearch contest went well. We closed with an idea to work with the city council to better introduce Japanese people to foreigners to try and prove we are not as scary as we seem in the media.
Natsumi's highlights: My Beautiful Summer | Blowing Bubbles | Holy Chicken Batman |