Courtesy of Madame (the coveted art of good manners)
3rd Sep, 2006
Japan is a country of collectors, anyone can gather that from the endless shelves of trading cards in the toystores, boxed figurines in the supermarket and gapshapon machines lining every convenience store. Everyone collects something.
The members of my eikaiwa collect manners.
These middle-aged community members are hell-bent on learning the most well-mannered ways to conduct themselves in English. They collect and trade new phrases like baseball cards, constantly challenging each other and showing off the most incredibly respectful, over-the-top polite English they can find, to deem who holds the rarest and most valuable cards. Sometimes they come up with terms that are so ridiculously polite no one would ever use them. No one except the Japanese that is.
When I gave one student a special card – ‘courtesy of’ – during my doyo lesson, her immediate response (after calming her own excitement) was “I must tell Z-san!”. Z-san is, of course, Madame’s best friend – and my class’ most zealous collector. Sometimes I can’t believe the stuff that comes out of this woman’s mouth. “Excuse me Amy, may I trouble you with a small question? In your opinion, is it perhaps appropriate that we consider the need to explain the full meaning of the term 'Waltzing Matilda' for the benefit of the class?” is a good example.
I decided to use this as a basis for a lesson – when I promised that next time we’d go over some polite forms of everyday expressions, the look on their faces was one of pure euphoria. This particular class is rather strict at times, and some members hold what I'll call 'influential positions' in my community and their relations to the BOE. You can imagine the position this puts me in as a teacher-come-lapdog. Either way, I'm glad I've finally found the key to their contentedness.
Japan is a country of collectors, anyone can gather that from the endless shelves of trading cards in the toystores, boxed figurines in the supermarket and gapshapon machines lining every convenience store. Everyone collects something.
The members of my eikaiwa collect manners.
These middle-aged community members are hell-bent on learning the most well-mannered ways to conduct themselves in English. They collect and trade new phrases like baseball cards, constantly challenging each other and showing off the most incredibly respectful, over-the-top polite English they can find, to deem who holds the rarest and most valuable cards. Sometimes they come up with terms that are so ridiculously polite no one would ever use them. No one except the Japanese that is.
When I gave one student a special card – ‘courtesy of’ – during my doyo lesson, her immediate response (after calming her own excitement) was “I must tell Z-san!”. Z-san is, of course, Madame’s best friend – and my class’ most zealous collector. Sometimes I can’t believe the stuff that comes out of this woman’s mouth. “Excuse me Amy, may I trouble you with a small question? In your opinion, is it perhaps appropriate that we consider the need to explain the full meaning of the term 'Waltzing Matilda' for the benefit of the class?” is a good example.
I decided to use this as a basis for a lesson – when I promised that next time we’d go over some polite forms of everyday expressions, the look on their faces was one of pure euphoria. This particular class is rather strict at times, and some members hold what I'll call 'influential positions' in my community and their relations to the BOE. You can imagine the position this puts me in as a teacher-come-lapdog. Either way, I'm glad I've finally found the key to their contentedness.
