Great Teacher A-Chan

I work with some very friendly and forgiving English teachers. They say there’s a balance when it comes to teaching staff – the worse the students, the better the staff. The warmth and good nature of our teachers is a glowing testament to how bratty all our kids are. When you’re constantly telling them not to jump out windows, you have to have a sense of humour.

One of these well-intentioned teachers is constantly asking to borrow things from me. Usually it’s something simple like ‘May I borrow your textbook?’ or ‘May I borrow your dictionary?’, and I’m more than happy to oblige. The other day she asked cordially ‘May I borrow an English book? Any book written completely in English – I want to show the students for an example.’ Sadly, despite having a good dozen books on and in my desk, they were all either Japanese, bilingual, or textbooks the kids had already seen. The exception of course, was the novel I currently had my nose buried in (there’s plenty of down-time at school, so keeping a novel in your drawer is essential). Now, I would’ve been happy to lend it to her for a class, apart from the minor inconvenience of having to stop reading it, were it not for the fact that I was reading Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. For the uninformed, Palahniuk is the author of such gems as Choke, Survivor and Fight Club. Invisible Monsters chronicles the misadventures of a pre-op transvestite and an ex-model with half her face blown off, travelling the American countryside pilfering prescription drugs from the rich. Considering such subject manner, and Palahniuk’s exceptionally raw and often grotesque gift for prose, this is not exactly the kind of book I want my coworkers flipping through, and especially not showing to students.

Thinking not-so-quickly, I made a great show of looking through drawers and papers for an English book, meanwhile sliding the novel under a stack of kindergarten eikaiwa cards. At last I confessed I had nothing to offer, much to my coworkers disappointment. The following morning I presented her with a book I’d brought from home - The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

On another occasion, the same teacher approached me with another odd request.

Coworker: Good morning. May I borrow a picture of your boyfriend?
A-chan: My… boyfriend?
Coworker: Yes. I want to teach students about past time, like ‘This is her boyfriend. She has loved him for 3 years’ or something like that.
A-chan: Uhhh… I don’t think I have a photo of my boyfriend on hand… sorry…

(Just to clear up the confusion – if you remember back to the incident with the kendo-playing highschool student and his mother, due to the overwhelming urge Japanese folks have to set me up, I’ve taken to inventing boyfriends).

Coworker: Oh, I see. That’s a shame. Well maybe another foreigner, we can pretend it’s your boyfriend. The students don’t know.
A-chan: Ok… let me see what I’ve got lying around…

I rummage through my desk and find the picture cards from my introduction lesson. I handed her a photo of Greenday’s Billy Joe. These ichinensei were only new, so hadn’t seen the cards before. Besides that, even those who had seen the cards, seemed to think that Greenday were either The Rolling Stones, or The Beatles. Yeah, they’re not so good with foreign bands. I figured I’d be safe.

She thanked me happily, insisting that this would be great. ‘How long have you loved him?’ she asked. ‘How… you mean how long have I been a fan? I don’t know… about 6 years I guess’. ‘Oh great! ‘This is her boyfriend. She has loved him for 6 years’. The students will be interested to hear that’. She scuttled back to her desk before I could offer any further protest. I’ll just have to accept that the students will think I’ve been dating Billy Joe for 6 years. This may make me sound like a bit of a skank, seeing as I told all of last year’s students that I was dating Johnny Depp. And for the record… she never returned the photo.

Posted by a-chan at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post   

OK folks, time for a little Q&A. I’ve been getting a lot of queries as to what’s going on with this little blog. Why has it dwindled to nothing? Have you just stopped blogging? PIKER!

The truth goes something like this: I’m a JET, traversing many a winding road. This means I’m employed on a contractual basis by the Board of Education by my town. Unluckily, that contract happens to feature a clause that states that JETs will not publicly disclose any information that could be incriminating about the school, its students, staff, or BOE. Given the somewhat… questionable nature of the stuff that goes down here, it’s darn-near impossible to write something that isn’t incriminating. Now, many JETs have blogs, and it’s generally accepted that as long as you’re careful, there’s not too much to worry about. However there was a case a few months back of a JET who was trashing teachers in his journal, which was subsequently discovered by the staff at his school. I don’t think he lost his contract, but he certainly copped a lot. Thus the rest of us were advised to blog with caution (You know, now I’m starting to feel like I’m part of an underground cult. The first rule of Blog Club is, you do not talk about Blog Club.). This little predicament became particularly relevant to me earlier this year when it was brought to my attention that one of my, shall we say, slightly over-eager pupils (well into adulthood, I might add – this is not a junior high deviant) had, as part of an overall pattern of eerie behaviour that smacks of stalkerism, researched your humble author on the interweb and thus stumbled upon the pages you currently peruse. With this admirer religiously following my posts, I’ve had to take great care in what information I dropped, lest I find myself in hot water. Hence I’ve been hesitant to continue with my usual vigour, and to be honest am somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed.

But for now, let’s put that aside and talk about something else: Nagashi soumen.

First let me take you back to the days of Summer Vacation. Japan, and especially Kansai, is known for its oppressive Summer heat. If you’d ever thought about shaving your head, this was the time to do it. When pit stains were so much a part of life that they became a non-event, and everyone wore Summer scarves – sports towels tied around their necks to soak up the sweat pouring off their faces.

As possibly the only JET in Kyoto not going anywhere for the Summer break, my BOE kindly filled my weekly schedule to relieve my boredom during those long, dull days. While I’m unsure of the method used to determine the nature of my activities, based on the results I can only assume the BOE posted a nice big advertisement in the local paper. ‘Local English teacher/gaijin novelty for hire! No task too humiliating! All days must be filled, call now before she’s all gone!’. Either that, or using one of those $5 ouiji boards from K-mart.

We had several ‘Mums and bubs’ sessions at the town hall, which involved all the local AETs pitching in to entertain 40+ toddlers and babies along with their almost exclusively monolingual mothers. It was essentially glorified mass babysitting. I also started giving eikaiwa for a group of junior high students who were preparing for an exchange trip to Australia. We had to set aside a whole lesson for ‘clothes inspection’ – students had brought in their intended wardrobes for me to check the Engrish and ensure there wasn’t anything likely to draw sniggers (apart from one boy’s t-shirt, which declared the necessity of hard boners, all were nonsensical, but acceptable). And of course, it wasn’t until the students returned from Australia that they finally believed what I’d been saying about water restrictions. One of the accompanying teachers had been staying on a farm, and had only bathed 4 times in the 10 days she stayed with her host family.

But my favourite event of the Summer was one of the ‘bonus’ classes I did with my kiddy eikaiwa – a cooking class. After attempting some very messy oven-free recipes (and the kids FREAKING OUT when shown sprinkles for the first time), the mothers set to work making soumen. Soumen, I should explain, is one of Japan’s many seasonal foods. In the hot weather, no one wants to eat anything warm or heavy, so soumen is a popular alternative. Very thin wheat noodles are cooked, then cooled in a communal bowl of iced water. From there, everyone grabs a bowl or cup, fills it with chilled soumen broth, adds their favourite flavours (shredded egg, ham, onions, seaweed etc) and starts to dip-and-eat. It’s a perfect Summer dish, and one I’d enjoyed several times already that season.

That’s why I was somewhat perplexed when, after entertaining the kids in a separate room, I returned to the kitchen to find a 10-foot long bamboo half-pipe arranged between the busily cooking mothers. The kids, of course, knew exactly what they were doing, and set about the task of personalising their soumen broth cups, completely nonplussed by what resembled a hamster water-slide in the middle of the kitchen. I joined them, carefully selecting my ingredients to ensure no salty miso and seaweed contamination, assuming the giant bowls of iced noodles would shortly appear before us. At this point, however, the children all excitedly began lining up along the length of the bamboo chute. My slowness to follow led a resounding chorus of ‘Emi-sensei! Emi-sensei!’ as each child begged me to stand next to them (though, due to my slight height advantage over a group of 5 year olds, I took to kneeling). And so, like tiny little assembly line workers, we waited before the pipe.

Before I had time to even ask, a rolling bolus of soumen came hurtling down the bamboo chute, and within 5 seconds it had slopped to the catchment at the far end, leaving behind it a line of happy children stuffing their mouths with noodles. I looked around in disbelief. What the broo-ha just happened? A moment later, another trail of soumen came rushing past, and this time I watched as the kids all snapped up mouthfuls of noodles with stalk-like precision. Catching my look of utter bewilderment, the student next to me looked up and asked ‘Don’t you know?’. I told her this was my first time seeing something like this. Big mistake. ‘EEEH?? Hey everyone, EVERYONE! Emi-sensei doesn’t know how to eat Nagashi Soumen!’. Cue a disbelieving ‘EEEEEEEHH?!’ from the whole class, and then it was on. I now had a dozen tiny teachers instructing me on the best noodle-catching technique, whilst the mothers, merrily pouring bowl after bowl of iced-soumen down the culinary waterslide, looked on and giggled. After a few miserable attempts, I finally managed to wrangle some soumen into my own cup. Aaah, the taste of victory! I quickly got the hang of it and happily ate my share along with the others. Of course, I should’ve known better than to satisfy my own appetite, as each child independently decided it was their personal mission to ensure I always had enough to eat. Within 2 minutes my cup went from almost-empty to a mountainous pile of past spilling out onto my hands. Of course, this also meant that my carefully customised soumen broth was a total waste of time, because having hosted noodles from every kid in the room, it now tasted like everything. And so I ate. And ate. Not wanting to let down the unrelenting, wide-eyed, adorably expectant children, I ate their soumen. I ate until I could eat no more. But still, they piled more noodles into my hands. I count myself lucky not to have drowned.

Despite the messiness, the tastebud assault, and the inevitable indigestion, it was a delightful experience. If you ever visit Japan in the Summer, I strongly suggest trying your hand at Nagashi Soumen – preferably with a group of excited 5-year-olds.

Posted by a-chan at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post   

Once a year, Japanese employees are requested to take a full health check, provided at the company’s expense, for insurance purposes. Most consider it a free doctor’s visit and are happy to oblige. However, knowing I speak very little Japanese, I was less than eager. No truly good afternoon begins with your (male) Board of Education supervisor trying to express in broken English that he wants you to pee into a cup.

The cup’s only the start. My supervisor quickly excuses himself, leaving me with a Japanese nurse who chirpily litmus tests my sample. This isn’t in a private room mind you; the urine lab has been hastily set up in a public corridor on the second floor of the town hall. She measures my height while the test registers, then apologetically tells me that my urine appears to be slightly less acidic than normal (at least I assume that’s what she was saying – my years as a biomed student taught me how to read these things for myself). I attempted to explain that this was most likely due to the 5 medications I was on – painkiller, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, multi-vitamins and iron supplements. She seemed to accept this and let me through – but not before telling the next doctor about my urine problem. In fact, all the doctors got told about this, regardless of their area of expertise. I failed to see how the pH of my urine was relevant to my long distance vision, for example.

Standard tests like weight, blood pressure and lung capacity were no real biggie because I already knew what to expect. Corneal examination, I did not. They ask you to put your head under a black cloth and look through a lens framed in a little box, just like an old-school camera. You there staring at a little green light for close to a minute, wondering if something is supposed to be happening, when suddenly you’re blinded by a light brighter than the sun exploding and fall backwards out of the box. Obviously I’ve been in Japan too long, because when the nurse picked me up asking if I was OK, all I could do was state the blatantly obvious:

‘I was surprised.’

Next was a test which I can only assume was similar to an ECG, but was more like a scene from Alien Autopsy. This was followed by a blood test, where I successfully freaked out the nurse with my insistence on watching the needle penetrate my vein (…I have a needle thing…).

Last on the list was a chest X-ray, where you’re permitted to keep your shirt so long as you lose the bra. Here I demonstrated my total gaijin superiority by jumping two Japanese women in the queue – apparently they do not know the legendary remove-your-bra-through-your-sleeve technique. A happy little snap by the most nervous Japanese man in existence (Gaijin boobies! Get them away! AWAY!), and I was free… for another 12 months.

Posted by a-chan at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post