Re-entry

I flew back to the US two days ago. Although it’s only been a year since my last visit, it seems like longer. As I disembarked from the plane, I did my best to see everything the way a Japanese person might, to notice all the differences.

The biggest one was how casual and unpolished the customer service seemed. I do think that Japan has the best customer service in the world, and staff are always dressed to impress and greet you in a formal and professional manner. So it was a bit jarring to get off the plane and be bellowed at as if we were cattle. “This way! No cell phones! Keep moving!” Amusingly, an airport volunteer came through with a survey about the airport’s level of customer service. I couldn’t help swelling with pride when I was able to translate her instructions to a nearby Japanese family.

I made it to customs and the customs officer asked me, “Where’d you go? What’d you do?” How many ways I could have answered that question. “I taught English in Japan,” I answered simply.

Moving on through airport security I watched the airport staff’s mounting frustration as people failed to follow directions. “Shoes OFF! Take all electronics OUT of your bags PLEASE!” There are no signs or written instructions, I thought. How are people supposed to know what to do? Especially if they don’t speak English as a first language. “Stack the trays before you leave,” one particularly frustrated employee grumbled at some Japanese visitors, who, uncomprehending, simply walked off. “Or just leave,” he muttered sarcastically. I sighed and considered making a suggestion about providing signs with clear instructions to the airport volunteer, but didn’t see her.

I went into the bathroom to freshen up and noticed that it wasn’t particularly clean. The bathroom stalls didn’t reach to the floor and none of the toilets or sinks were automatic. For me, it was no big deal, but I imagined what kind of an impression this would leave on a newly arrived visitor. Feeling better after I’d washed my face, put on make-up, and brushed my hair and teeth, I ventured back out into the terminal.

My first stop was at Peet’s coffee for a decent cup of joe. The sizes, I felt, were huge and I ordered a small. But it was so delicious. I sat with my coffee and people-watched. There was a wider variety of people in my little corner of airport than I’d ever seen anywhere in Japan. The diversity was nice. Nobody stared at me. I felt normal. I felt human. It was weird to be able to understand everyone’s conversations without any effort. Almost overwhelming, actually. But everyone seemed so relaxed and at ease. People smiled and laughed, and it wasn’t so oppressively quiet as it sometimes seems in Japan. And the couple in front of me actually kissed on the lips! Shocking. You would never see that in public in Japan.

I continued to notice these kinds of differences on my way home.  In another shop, I saw a vacationing family just wearing their swimming suits. The women’s were particularly revealing and I realized how strange that would seem to a foreign visitor from a more conservative culture. In fact, everyone’s clothing seemed very casual compared with the suits and uniforms I was used to seeing. Not only clothing, but also attitudes, as I already mentioned. We had dinner at a fairly nice Italian restaurant, but the server joked and made small talk with us all evening. I simply wasn’t used to this after all of Japan’s formalities.

The inn I was staying at was run by a latino family and I watched with appreciation as my receptionist switched flawlessly between Spanish and English. A convenience store I stopped at was being staffed by a guy from India. When my parents explained that I had been teaching English in Japan (something they embarrassingly never failed to mention, no matter where we went) he asked me”How did you like it?”. “There were some things I liked and some things I didn’t like,” I answered honestly. “Yes, that’s true everywhere,” he said. “I know exactly how you felt.” I’m sure you do, I thought. He said he missed his home and I told him to hang in there.

And this is one of the most valuable things I have gained from my time abroad, an appreciation for the foreigner. We live in xenophobic times where many people believe that culture should be “pure” and that we have to keep outsiders from taking our piece of the economic pie. And yet, whatever you believe about culture or immigration or economics or anything like that, I think it doesn’t cost us much to be kind to the stranger in our midst. “‘When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” Leviticus 19:33-34.

Last Day of School

Today was my last day working as an ALT in Japan. It may not be kosher to say so, but honestly I’m kind of relieved. I try not to focus on negative things too much, but there’s no denying that moving to another country is challenging and living and working in Japan has been especially so for me.

A lot of times, especially in the early days, I felt more like some sort of circus monkey than any kind of teacher. Students would stare at me wide-eyed and silent as I stood in front of them and explained for what felt like the 100th time that I like sushi and I’ve never eaten natto. “Step right up and see the exotic foreigner! This one has blond hair and blue eyes!” I can remember students literally lining up outside the teachers’ room to get a look at me. Luckily that died down after a while, but I could never get over the feeling that I was always on display.

Then there were the teachers. The ones who would ignore me. The ones who refused to call me sensei. The ones who talked down to me as if I were not only foreign, but also dim-witted. And my favorite. The older male teacher who always spoke to me in monosyllables and called me by my last name without adding “Miss” or “sensei” or even “san.” He basically treated me like I was his dog.

However, those are the horror stories. I have more of them than I would like, but not all the teachers were like that. Many of them were very kind and did their best to make me feel welcome, despite the huge language barrier. They offered me snacks, tried to speak English, tolerated my horrendous Japanese, and took time out of their busy days to notice me. I truly appreciated every small act of kindness that came my way.

The students too, in many cases, managed to get over their shyness and showed me a lot of kindness and appreciation. They could be very awkward and funny at times. I remember one incident afterI first arrived where I was minding my own business and a student ran up to me with no introduction and exclaimed “Hi! I went to Canada!” But they’re just kids and most of them were very good-natured and eager to learn. I loved correcting their English essays because they were so creative and fun to read.

This job. This job has been one of the most frustrating and difficult things I’ve ever done for many reasons. I can’t even begin to describe here what my experience has been. I think it was a good thing to do, and I think I got a lot out of it, but I feel a sense of accomplishment that I made it through.

So today I arrived at school in my required black suit. It was, luckily, not overbearingly hot weather. I had flashbacks to my first few days. How nervous I had felt then. How confusing it had all been. How much I had to learn. Today we had the closing ceremony for the semester, and just like when I arrived I got up in front of the entire student body and gave a speech. But this time, while I was nervous, I felt more confident of what to do. The culture didn’t seem so foreign, I knew when to bow, and how to conduct myself, and generally it was all much easier and less threatening than at first. I gave the speech in Japanese (I didn’t write it myself, but I still felt a sense of accomplishment) and took pictures with a few students and that was that. As I left the school, some of the boys practicing after-school sports waved to me and said “Goodbye! You are beautiful!” It is one of the ironies of my life here: never before have I felt so admired and at the same time never before have I felt so ignored.

Later, I went to the staff party which doubled as my farewell party. I could recognize most of the food, and I also actually liked most of it (which is never a guarantee). It was a bit awkward at first, as usual, but after everyone had had a few drinks the other teachers came and talked to me and the time went quickly. But I couldn’t help feeling relieved that this was the last time I would have to attend one of these events.

At the end of the evening, one of the new English teachers drove me home. We had some good (English) conversation. She has just moved to Aomori from a smaller town and is still adjusting to life here. I reflected that it’s not just us foreigners who go through transitions here in Japan.

I have a few more weeks left before I return to the US. There are a lot of things I could still write about, and maybe I will. But for now I wanted to share some of my final impressions of life as an ALT. It’s a different sort of job, and I don’t think it’s something I would be willing to do again, but it provided me with many opportunities, gave me a paycheck, and put a roof over my head for two years. There are a lot of ways it could have been better, but there are also a lot of ways that it could have been worse. And that’s pretty much the best way that I can summarize it.

You’re so Japanese!

“You have a Japanese soul,” one of my colleagues said to me the other day. He was asking me for my preference on something and I kept telling him that I really didn’t care because I really didn’t care. My colleagues are often impressed with this lack of assertiveness (so different from America!) and remark on how Japanese I am. “You’re so Japanese!” they exclaim when I’m hesitant to take snacks or gifts from them. In this case it’s more that I’m not confident about how to act, but apparently this lack of confidence works. “You’re becoming more Japanese day by day,” another colleague commented when he saw me eating an onigiri (a sort of rice cake) for lunch. I just happen to like eating onigiri every once in a while. They’re a nice change from sandwiches.

When I first arrived in Japan, I attempted to follow Japanese rules and I did it badly. My bowing was awkward and excessive, my greetings were too loud and halting, I still can’t change out of my shoes quickly but at least I don’t fall over any more… After some time I was able to observe the people around me and my attempts became less cartoonish and more natural. However, in other ways I adapted fairly quickly to what is considered polite behavior here, and it’s partially because I was so nervous and unsure. That meant that every time I was offered something, I was never sure if I should accept. I was always shy of speaking up or causing trouble for someone. I tended to defer to others’ wishes. Those tendencies have served me well in smoothing the human relations between me and those around me. And I think it has, to some extent, surprised my colleagues, because it goes against the stereotype of the loud, brash American.

In America, being an extrovert is the ideal. It’s good to be outgoing, gregarious, and assertive. It doesn’t necessarily matter how much you know as long as you’re confident. This ideal does not match my personality in many ways, and so it has been kind of nice to feel like my way of being is valued here. However, it’s kind of a double-edged sword, because as a foreigner I’m often expected to take center stage, and that’s very uncomfortable for me. Also, the fact that I’m not outgoing means it’s difficult for me to go out to events and meet people. So in some ways being more introverted is helpful in Japan, but in others it kind of sabotages you.

However the truth is that even though I feel like I fit in to the culture in some ways, there are other ways that I will never fit in to Japanese society. Japan is all about hierarchy and where you fit in to that hierarchy. The very language is built around it: knowing when to use formal or informal grammar, when and how to use honorifics, knowing how to identify your status relative to that of the people around you. All of these things are part of Japanese social education, something you are taught and also acquire naturally as a Japanese person raised in Japan. But I never received this social education, so I don’t know how to conduct myself properly in social situations here. Furthermore, I don’t fit neatly into the hierarchy because I am an outside person. I don’t belong within any group here so I am essentially without status. I still bristle when some of the teachers address me as san instead of sensei (which is the term of respect for teachers) but in their eyes I haven’t earned the title of sensei . The truth is that the world I come from plays by different rules, and I don’t know the rules here well enough to really play the game properly. So while in some ways my behavior may seem Japanese to the people around me, there are lots of ways that it is not and never will be.

When I first came to Japan, I sort of measured myself based on how well I was assimilating into the culture. My adaptability was a point of pride. But measuring yourself that way is setting yourself up for failure. If I could go back in time, I would tell myself that it’s good to be open and aware and sensitive to the culture you are living in, but you don’t have to change who you are, and if some things are difficult for you, that’s okay. You don’t have to like everything about your host culture. You don’t have to fit in with all of it, and that’s important, because you’re not going to. Living in another culture is always going to be a little uncomfortable. Doing so successfully means learning to live with that discomfort.

And I suppose that is something I will have to remember as I transition back to the US, because living abroad does change you, and it does make it more difficult to fit in with your home culture. I haven’t lived abroad for a very extended period of time (two years is long, but not so long compared to many expats), but I’ve still been influenced by the culture here. Hopefully the transition will go smoothly, but I’m sure there will be challenges. In any case, I think learning to live with and even to lean in to discomfort, can be beneficial sometimes. Wait, am I saying that suffering can be good for you? Perhaps I’ve become more Japanese than I thought… 😉

Culture Shock Japan – Zangyou

Zangyou is the Japanese word for “overtime,” and it is as much a defining part of the culture as kimono and tea ceremonies. I knew that Japanese people work a lot before coming to Japan, but I had no idea the extent of it and how widespread the tendency is across society.

When I first arrived, nervous and anxious to fit in, I resolved to approach the overtime thing with an open mind. After all, I am a guest in another culture and felt it wasn’t my place to judge. I even tried to stay late at school sometimes, partly to show how dedicated I was. I never stayed late just for the heck of it, but I waited on students and killed time before evening appointments. I always felt bad (and still do) about leaving before all the other teachers.

However, I could barely disguise my distaste when I learned that there was a bell to remind students to go home at 7 PM. The teachers themselves are allowed to stay in the building until 8 PM. I couldn’t imagine it, routinely working 12 hour days like that. And to top it off, 8 PM is considered early by Japanese standards. Often Japanese employees will work until 10 PM, or until the last train home, or in some cases even spend the night at the office. And days off? Forget a two-day weekend, Japanese people are lucky to get one day off a week on a regular basis. My colleagues often have to work weekends because of sports events and extra classes on Saturdays. I’ll get into that later. The point is, work-life balance is a foreign concept here. When people take vacations, they are generally for a week or even less. Going to Europe for only a few days is not unheard of. It’s intense.

It became apparent to me early on that I was never going to adapt to this. I have pretty strong beliefs about the importance of work-life balance. Not only do I think it’s healthy and important for things like family and relationships, but ultimately I think it makes people more productive, not less. Japanese people spend ridiculous amounts of time at work, but often they aren’t really doing all that much. It’s not uncommon for me to see other teachers surfing the web or even napping. I nearly burned myself out at first because I was trying to be productive for every minute I was at work, the way I was trained to be in America.

And there are serious consequences to society beyond the negative effect on productivity. It’s no secret that Japan’s birthrate has been falling for years. The suicide rate is very high and there is even a word in Japanese for death from overwork, karoshi. Women have a difficult time in the workplace because they are still expected to be homemakers and care providers, and in a lot of instances if they get married/have children companies will pressure them to quit since they will have other interests competing for their time. Last year, a high profile case of a young woman’s suicide became big news. The reason for her death? She was forced to work over 100 hours of overtime in a single month. Not an uncommon occurrence here, it seems! I don’t know of any suicides, but I have heard personal accounts of people having breakdowns, depression, and serious health issues due to overwork.

The truth is that while there are existing labor laws on the books, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of enforcement. Furthermore, companies have many ways of coercing employees to work long hours without reporting them.

All of these things are well-known problems and there is a push for change, but in such a hierarchical society change is hard to realize. Still there have been some hopeful developments. Some companies have started instituting “no overtime days,” to force employees to go home on time. The term “black company” has also come into use, signifying companies that have particularly exploitative labor practices. Still, Japan has such a long way to go concerning this issue. Japanese people are so used to the way the system has run for decades that it’s hard for organizations to conceive of any other way to run things, and the entire country from elementary school on up is built upon this system. Japanese people get so inured to it they don’t even think twice about spending all their time at work or school.

Take my students for example. They come to school around 8 AM, but some come earlier to study in the library or practice their club activity. Then it’s classes until 4 PM or so, when they have school cleaning time, which Japanese schools are so famous for. After that there is more studying/club activities, often until 6 or 7 PM, but in some cases the day isn’t over. Some students also go to something called cram school in order to get a leg up on preparing for university entrance examinations. Then on the weekends there are often extra club activity practices, sports games, events, and “Saturday school,” which is just an extra day of school. By the time they become adults, they are so used to this kind of schedule they don’t think anything of it. And to be honest, the parents need it to be this way too because most of them are working so many hours they can’t be home with their kids. There are some stay-at-home parents, and a lot of mothers work part-time, but spending time at home with your family isn’t a big part of life here.

Contrast this with my childhood. My mom was a stay-at-home mom/worked from home. I enjoyed a lot of extracurricular activities as a child and teen, but I also remember having huge chunks of free time where I would explore outside, read, write stories, play piano, or just daydream. I was fortunate to have two very supportive parents who spent a lot of time with me. We spent a lot of time together as a family: hiking, watching movies, playing games, and so forth. So for me to come from that to this incessant workaholic culture was a HUGE culture shock and the biggest indicator that my love affair with Japan was probably going to be short-lived.

Living in Japan has given me a lot of perspective on what’s important to me. Japan is seductive in that it offers the promise of stability and financial security. It’s fairly easy for English-speakers to find a job and support themselves. But the stability of the society comes at a cost, and I feel that that cost is very high. I hope that Japan continues to become a society more open to work-life balance and more supportive of family life. Until then, I think it will continue to face serious problems.

Nihongo ga jouzu desu ne (follow-up post)

Today I was at the pharmacy buying contact solution. Either the cashier was low on change or he saw that my wallet was bulging with coins, I’m not sure which. But he asked if I could give exact change and, after some back and forth conversation we completed the transaction. As I was putting my wallet away he filled the silence with the typical “Nihongo ga jouzu desu ne” (your Japanese is very good) to which I gave the standard reply “Mada mada desu” (Not yet) But then he ventured to ask me how long I’d been in Japan. The question was a bit fast but I got the gist of it. “two years” I answered in Japanese. “What!? Only two years and you can already speak that much? WOW!” He said quite earnestly. At which point I got very flustered, felt myself blushing, and stammered something about how I study a lot before running away with my purchase.

But then I thought about my last blog post and how I feel that Nihongo ga jouzu desu ne is just a greeting. I still think it’s true, but in this case the greeting changed into a very genuine compliment and you know what? It felt really good to hear. I have worked very hard at studying Japanese and it’s nice when people genuinely notice those efforts. I guess I don’t mind being reminded I’m a foreigner if it means someone will stroke my ego! But beyond that, I think it’s the authenticity of the interaction that made the difference. So thank you, pharmacy clerk. You made my day.

Your Japanese is very good!

Yesterday I was sitting at a cafe, enjoying a coffee and a book while waiting for my next appointment. The tables were placed close together, and the seating was booth style. The cafe was pretty busy, and a couple of older Japanese women sat down at the table next to me. I felt that my coat and purse, which I had placed beside me, were kind of invading their space so I quickly moved them out of the way. The woman sitting down next to me apologized, “Sumimasen! Sumimasen!” (sorry! sorry!) so I smiled and shook my head “iie, iie” (not at all, not at all). I went back to my book, but the woman looked at me with a guilty expression and then exclaimed “Nihongo ga jouzu desu ne!” (Your Japanese is very good!) I hadn’t really spoken!

It made me chuckle, because “Nihongo ga jouzu desu ne” is one of the phrases that foreigners in Japan hear all. the. time. It doesn’t matter if you can barely say hello, Japanese people will gush over your linguistic ability, as you smile dumbly or, in my case, stare at them as if they are insane. This probably doesn’t make me many friends. But in this situation, it became so clear to me how things can get so lost in translation and how the behaviors I find particularly annoying often have a harmless intention. It doesn’t make them any less annoying, but it helps me take it less personally. It was obvious to both of us that this woman wasn’t really complimenting my Japanese. She was just trying to say something to make the interaction more positive. And honestly she made such a big deal out of me moving my coat to another chair that I couldn’t really feel annoyed. It was so ridiculous it became endearing.

All that’s really required in these interactions is to reply with the appropriate response, “mada mada desu” (it isn’t very good yet). This shows a proper sense of humility. And then when we’ve gotten the formalities out of the way, we can move on to actual conversation.

When explaining this to non-Japanese people, I usually liken it to the phrase “how are you” in English. “How are you,” usually doesn’t really mean “how are you?” A more literal translation might be something along the lines of “we are both humans in the same location and therefore it’s polite for me to acknowledge your existence.” Some people feel that “how are you” as a greeting is insincere, and they have a point, but do you honestly really want to hear the intricate details of another person’s emotions every time you greet them? I suppose we could all just say “hello” and leave it at that.

Every time I teach the phrase “how are you” to my students, they always reply with “I’m happy!” or “I’m sleepy,” or “I’m hungry.” It takes them a while to learn (and it takes me a while to teach) that “how are you” is just a set phrase. “How are you?” “I’m fine, and you?” “Fine thanks.” The end. To say, “I’m hungry,” is kind of weird. I did exactly the same thing in Thailand. The staff at my school would always ask, “gin khao reu yan?” (have you eaten yet?). And I would get confused and answer honestly, and then they would look at me with a funny expression. Because “have you eaten yet,” was just a greeting. They weren’t actually asking me about my eating habits. This is how you end up looking silly in a foreign country.

Japanese has a lot of these kinds of filler expressions. If taken at face value, they seem really strange. I remember early on a colleague telling me (in Japanese), “it’s getting cooler, isn’t it?” I was in a t-shirt, and I didn’t know whether they were telling me to put on a jacket? It really wasn’t that cold. But the point wasn’t the actual state of the weather. It was fall, and in fall you start conversations with “it’s getting cooler, isn’t it?” just like in summer you start conversations with “it’s hot, isn’t it?” Now I realize that they were just trying to be friendly, but at the time it was just confusing. And this is where a good deal of the initial barriers between me and colleagues came from. They were trying to be nice, but I didn’t realize it and I didn’t know how to respond.

Which brings me back to nihongo ga jouzu desu ne. I think the reason this expression and its close relative “Can you use chopsticks?” feel a bit offensive is that, under an innocent guise, they ever so slyly point out your foreignness. It is one of the many ways that foreigners in Japan are reminded, day in and day out, that they do not and never will really belong in this country. I think nine times out of ten, Japanese people are simply drawing from the list of questions they feel they can ask foreigners. But when you have lived here for over a year and eat your lunch with chopsticks almost every day and study Japanese for hours every day (yet still feel like you can barely communicate) it starts to feel insulting.

At a recent school function, I was sitting next to a staff member and as we were enjoying our food he looked over at me and said, “Can you use chopsticks?” This man had seen me eating with chopsticks in the staff room. We had dined together before. I’m pretty sure he had already asked me this question at least once. And it’s moments like this that make me feel like people here aren’t really interested in getting to know me at all. And in a way, I can’t blame them. They have their own lives, and I’m just a blip on their radar. Here today, gone tomorrow kind of thing. But it still stings when you’ve invested so much time and energy into a community and yet feel that at the end of the day, you are just another foreign face.

So, even though I try not to get offended by questions like “can you use chopsticks?” because I know there’s no ill intent behind them, I think they reveal a deeper reality: that in Japan there is a deep psychological divide between what is Japanese and what is foreign. Japan is not a land of immigrants, and Japanese culture has a long and rich history. Foreigners in Japan are required to perform a strange balancing act between appreciating their host culture, while realizing that they will never be fully accepted by it. Foreigners who do well here make their peace with this and, in some ways, embrace it. There are certain freedoms attached to being a gaijin, an “outside person.” Not much is expected of us, this fact is often a blessing in disguise. Make a social blunder? You’re a foreigner. Don’t want to participate in that “obligatory” event? You’re a foreigner. Don’t want to work unpaid overtime? You’re a foreigner. You may get asked the same five questions over and over, but there are benefits to being an outside person, as long as you’re comfortable on the outside.

Learning to Read Kanji II

I love literacy. Let me put that another way. I love being literate. Okay, I’m not really literate in Japanese yet, but it occurred to me the other day when I was doing my laundry that I can actually read the options on my washing machine. Similarly, when I walk or drive around town I can understand the majority of the signs I encounter. The feeling of going from absolute helplessness and confusion to having the ability to understand my surroundings is tremendously empowering. When I lived in the States, I helped teach a class of immigrants and refugees who couldn’t read or write in English. I now have a much deeper understanding of how they must have felt.

When I first started learning kanji, the process was overwhelming. Especially as the shapes got more complex, there were so many small differences to notice and remember. For example the difference between the kanji for “truth” 実 and the kanji for “beauty” 美 is almost unnoticeable until you see them next to each other, on a test question for example. It gets more complicated when you have vocabulary words that use more than one kanji.

Because I’m mostly learning through self-study, I don’t/didn’t have a teacher to guide me through the complexities of how kanji work. I just had a textbook and a dictionary. So I made some mistakes and was a bit inefficient about my methods of studying at first

Mistake #1 – Trying to memorize kanji from a list. Remember how I talked about how I felt memorizing vocabulary from a list might be an okay learning strategy? Well, I still stand by that, at least in the beginning stages, but because I had no guidance on where to start I just indiscriminately used lists from Memrise.com. This meant I was memorizing arcane kanji used on language proficiency tests when I should have been learning useful kanji like 空 (space) and 満 (full) which are the kanji used in parking lots. I’ve gotten a lot more mileage (teehee) out of those two than I ever have from memorizing the kanji for “soil” even though that came up on some of the quiz lists. -_-

Here’s what I think about lists: they’re only as good as whoever made them. As a beginning learner you don’t always know what is or isn’t going to be useful. I’ve found that just memorizing words works for concrete terms like “apple” and “cat,” but is less useful for more abstract terms like “justice” or “prevention.”

Mistake #2 – Trying to memorize kanji readings. Okay, actually I never tried this, so I don’t know, maybe it works for some people. But for me it always seemed like a waste of time because I knew I would never be able to keep them straight. Every kanji has two “readings,” a “Chinese” reading and a “Japanese” reading. I didn’t know this at first which made for a fair amount of headaches. By the time I’d figured it out, I’d already made pretty good progress without worrying about it. See, I’d rather remember the word the kanji is associated with than a long list of possible readings. For example, it’s way easier for me to remember that　楽＝raku and 楽しい=tanoshii, rather than memorizing which is the Chinese reading and which is the Japanese reading. I honestly couldn’t tell you most of the time which is which, but I’ve finished reading a YA novel in Japanese so… don’t waste your time with memorization gymnastics.

Mistake #3 – Trying to learn kanji like a Japanese person. This is a major hurdle that I think a  lot of Japanese learners in Japan run up against. A lot of Japanese native teachers try to teach foreigners the way they would teach Japanese children, which means lots of copying and repetition. The big difference is, Japanese children already know the words they’re being taught, they just need to become literate. Foreign learners don’t have the same knowledge. Learning a second language is not the same as learning your first language. I think a better way, and what I’ve been doing, is to memorize basic kanji meanings by sight using flashcards or something like Memrise.com and then get reading asap. The more you read, the more automatic it will get. I subscribed to the Hiragana Times for a year, which is a magazine written for Japanese learners, and it was really good practice BUT…

Mistake #4 – Relying too much on furigana. Most Japanese resources written for learners include furigana, a guide on how to read the kanji. These are super helpful when you are a beginner because you can look up new words much more quickly, but after a certain point they become a crutch and an article you might read easily with the help of furigana could become completely indecipherable without it. So at a certain point I started blacking out the furigana to challenge myself to just read the kanji without any help. I really think this has helped my reading ability a great deal. Of course it was a HUGE pain at first because reading one little paragraph took f-o-r-e-v-e-r but I really think it paid dividends which brings me to…

Mistake #5 – This one’s not really a mistake, actually, it’s just that I didn’t have a teacher to show me how kanji work. So it took me a while to understand the idea of radicals. Once you start to memorize radicals, kanji recognition becomes so. much. easier. When I started to read without furigana, I needed to look up kanji using my electronic dictionary. Even though there was a draw function, I could never get it to work, so I was stuck with looking things up by radical, and that’s when it started to click. For example, one of the first words I learned was 熱い atsui or “hot.” When I was starting out, just looking at kanji like this was enough to practically give me an aneurysm. But after a bit, I began to recognize the individual radicals including 丸 which happens to be the kanji for circle. It may not make much sense from this explanation, but basically the more complex kanji just recycle the same set of simple shapes. Once my brain had grasped this, recognizing and differentiating between kanji became way easier.

One more tip, don’t just read, write! And write by hand. There is research that shows when we write things out by hand we are more likely to remember them. I don’t mean mindlessly copying out kanji. There might be some benefits to that, but I think it feels more productive than it actually is. I can’t write a lot of kanji from memory, but I keep a journal in Japanese. Usually I type it out, upload it to a site like Lang-8, and then rewrite the corrections by hand. This has been incredibly helpful not only for kanji memorization, but because it helps me become aware of my own language learning. Plus it’s a great way to track your progress. Early on, I wasn’t able to write much and I probably averaged only one entry per month. I just didn’t have the vocabulary or grammar to make more frequent entries that weren’t super repetitive. I think it’s more important to give yourself a reasonable target than to set yourself up for failure. If I’d said something like “I’m going to write every day,” I probably wouldn’t have followed through and would have become discouraged.

I know when I started studying Japanese, kanji seemed like the most daunting part of the language. But I think it’s best to face the challenge head on, even though it makes the beginning stages of learning pretty difficult. Believe it or not, kanji actually help me to memorize vocabulary now, because they are an image my mind can latch onto. And the sooner you can read kanji, the faster your vocabulary will increase because you will be able to read Japanese in context, without resorting to lists. 頑張ろう！

Japanese Education – Take 2

Graduation was last week, and as I sat through the ceremony I could really sense the difference between my feelings and perceptions last year as compared with now. Last year I could barely speak or read any Japanese, this year while I still don’t understand a lot of what’s going on I can follow basic conversations and read quite a bit more! I know what to expect regarding these kinds of ceremonies and I feel that my cultural understanding is much deeper. I’m no longer caricaturing academic cross-cultural models I’ve picked up from books, or at least not as much.

Last year I wrote a post outlining my observations about the Japanese education system and some of the ways it differs from the American system. Those observations were pretty superficial first impressions and now that I feel I understand this country better I want to take some time to reflect on how those perceptions have evolved. In doing so, I can’t help adding some reflections on the JET program and how the ALT position fits (or rather, doesn’t) into the education system here.

When you walk into a Japanese classroom, you will most likely be confronted by a class of about 40 students, all in uniform, sitting in desks aligned in straight rows. At the head of the classroom is a blackboard and a lectern on top of a raised platform from which the teacher teaches. This is what would be termed the “transmission” style of teaching in my teacher training programs. The teacher is the focus point and source of knowledge. The teacher’s job is to transmit that knowledge to the students, who in turn must sit and listen carefully to absorb that knowledge. As I’ve mentioned before, teaching is a high status profession in Japan and questioning a teacher isn’t done (at least not openly.)

I think there are probably a lot of reasons that Japan has gravitated towards this model. One of them has to do with the fact that Japanese society is extremely hierarchical. In Japan, everything and everyone is ranked. It is so different from my American notions of equality. The ranking begins in school, with the sempai/kohai system. Students in higher grades are sempai while those in lower grades are kohai. The kohai must respect the sempai and the sempai have authority over the kohai. This system continues into the workplace where workers are ranked according to age and amount of time they’ve spent at a company. I think the whole thing is rooted in Japan’s lifetime employment system. (Well, actually I think it’s rooted in Confucianism, but I want to keep this post a readable length). Traditionally, once hired, a Japanese employee stays with the same company for life. Promotions are based not on performance, but on seniority. In this way, Japan created a remarkably stable society with a large middle class. However, it seems things are starting to unravel a bit as this system doesn’t really lend itself to efficiency or productivity, and so very gradually due to economic factors the system is changing. It will be interesting to see how things develop.

Back to education, the focus of Japanese education is therefore not discussion or Socratic thinking but rather to acquire and memorize information. This seems to me to be connected to the focus on testing. Students work hard to pass examinations, primarily university entrance examinations. The ability to enter a good university is directly linked to the ability to find lifetime employment at a good company. And so we have the system we see today. In most English classes, the teacher stands up front and talks about various complicated grammar points. The students sit silently and try to answer complicated grammar questions.

Enter the hapless Assistant Language Teacher (ALT), in many cases a young, recent graduate. In my case, a language nerd with a weakness for travel. This person is thrown into the current system with a few training workshops and a pamphlet of fun English games and told to give it their best. Unfortunately, this arrangement is often, in many cases, a classic example of a square peg in a round hole.

In the first place, the ALT position is just sort of tacked on as an afterthought. Japanese people know that learning English is important for internationalization, so the solution seems to be just to expose students and teachers to native speakers, with very little thought given to how those native speakers will actually function in the classroom. So then, the Japanese English teachers are given this extra person who they have to work with, but very little guidance with how to actually utilize this resource. There’s also very little room for flexibility in the school curriculum, which means there isn’t a lot of time or freedom to do extra English activities. The upshot being that often team teaching classes with an ALT devolve into the ALT being used as a human tape-recorder. I have a few classes where my main role is to stand in front of the class and read off a (very) random list of English words or read passages from the textbook out loud.

In other cases where teachers are more creative or open-minded, the ALT can come in and do things like fun conversation games as part of the class. To be honest, I think this has a somewhat negative effect on ideas about English teaching in Japan. “Communicative” teaching is often perceived as “just playing games.” I think this is bad for the EFL profession and bad for English education in general. It divides teaching into “boring but serious grammar stuff” and “fun but not important game stuff.” The end result? Very little communicative competence. Last year I fought the good fight to try and change these perceptions. I made some headway, but it is a fight I mostly lost.

As far as my situation goes, I was fairly lucky. Because my school incorporates extra English classes, I have to some degree been able to work around the education system. For a while I was trying to create communicative activities based on the school curriculum, but I realized that that approach wasn’t really tenable for a lot of reasons and this semester I scrapped the curriculum completely and have been following my own lesson plans. The lack of structure is difficult to deal with, but it’s something I’m fairly used to by now because of the nature of my previous teaching positions.

So, there are a lot of things to wrap up in this post. Firstly, I’d like to say that I’m not trying to bash or put down the JET program or Japanese education. Japan has a completely different culture from America and this has made me wonder how successful American teaching approaches could actually be here. There is an interesting tension between how Japanese culture values authority and respect, and how American cultural values equality and questioning authority. That is a tension that is difficult to resolve. Regarding language teaching, I don’t think there’s any reason Japanese students can’t learn English in a communicative way. Given the right atmosphere, one that’s safe and has a bit of structure, it is possible to get even the shyest of students to talk. What’s needed is teacher training and more flexible curriculum, but that would take a lot of change and change comes slowly here. And of course, all of these observations and ideas are my personal opinions, formed after a mere year and a half of living here, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

This post ended up being a lot longer and more involved than I intended. There are a lot of things to talk about when you talk about education and I’ve tried to go a bit deeper into some of the cultural and practical reasons for why the system here is what it is. As someone who values education and who has very American ideas about what it should be, I’ll admit that working in a Japanese high school has been fairly frustrating for me. But as with a lot of things here, I’ve learned to let a lot of things go, work around obstacles as much as I can, and be happy with having “good enough” lessons, even if they fall short of the type of teaching I would like to do. I get a lot of satisfaction from interacting with my students, watching them experiment with English, and helping them learn more about the wider world. In those ways, being an ALT has been meaningful for me, even if I have had my share of frustrations.

Surviving the Aomori Winter

It’s 8:45 p.m. on a weekday night, and I am outside, at a gas station, in my pajamas. The overhead lights beam down on me as I fumble with the cap to the large plastic tank that I use for storing kerosene. I hope that my winter coat hides the fact that I am less than suitably dressed as cars drive past on the highway. I manage to decipher the kanji on the kerosene pump (no English option on this machine), fill my tank, load it back into my car, and return home. Just another joyful experience of living in snow country in the winter.

Approximately half an hour earlier I had just changed into my pajamas and cozily settled down in bed next to my kerosene stove. It’s huge and clunky and looks like it was made in the 70s, but it is all that stands between me and hypothermia. And then, just as I get comfortable, I hear the familiar sucking sound that means the tank is almost empty. I sigh and go to the closet where I keep the extra kerosene. All my tanks are empty. I forgot to buy back-up kerosene on my last shopping run  Lovely. For a short time I consider just going to bed and dealing with it tomorrow, but then I try to envision getting ready for school the next morning in below-freezing temperatures. I don’t relish the thought, but the last thing I want to do is go out into the dark and cold after I’ve already gotten ready for bed. So, in an act of rebellion, I throw my coat on over my pajamas and defy public opinion. I’m supposed to be a strange foreigner anyways, so what does it matter.

The Aomori winter can be pretty brutal, and I barely survived last year, where every morning my car was buried under at least a foot of snow. Fortunately for me, this year’s winter has been much less intense and the amount of snow we’ve gotten has been comparable to a regular winter back home. But the very nature of how Japan deals with cold weather still means there is considerable suffering. Maybe it’s because it’s a Buddhist country, I don’t know.

In Japan, you don’t heat your entire house or apartment, but only the main rooms. I started closing off half of my apartment around November as temperatures began to really dive. Whenever I need to do chores like laundry or basic cleaning, I generally have to wear my winter coat because it is so freaking cold. My bedroom is completely freezing and has no insulation, so last year I experimented with using a futon in the main living area, but it seemed a little grungy and it was pretty troublesome, so this year I just pulled my mattress to the center of my apartment and called it good.

In the morning, I usually set my alarm for an hour before I actually need to get up so that I can turn on my stove and heat up the apartment. Because the bathroom and shower are outside the heated area, showering is always a stimulating test of endurance. The clothes I’ve stored in the closet generally feel like I’ve been storing them in the freezer. And I should not be able to see my breath when I’m inside a building.

When I’m ready to go to school, I have to dig my car out from under a foot of snow and navigate roadways that look more like bobsled tracks. When the weather is really bad, it’s hard to see around corners because the snowbanks are taller than the height of my car. When I return home, I have to shovel my parking space. This takes over 30 minutes. I do this while glaring in envy at my neighbors’ heated parking spaces. My neighbors never have to shovel anything.

I have to buy kerosene at the store or at the gas station, and that means that I have to lug 18 liter tanks of kerosene to and from my car and up three flights of stairs. Because I live on the third floor. Naturally. When the stove’s tank runs out, I have to refill it with a contraption that is basically a giant turkey baster. It takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

Basically, winter is a huge pain to deal with. This is coming from someone who usually loves snow. But that is one small good point. The snow is very pretty and the temperature never drops very far below freezing, thankfully. This year I was much more prepared for what I would be dealing with, and so far it’s ended up being not that bad. But I still can’t wait until I can sleep in my actual bedroom again.

 

How I Study Japanese III

I’ve been meaning to post about my language learning progress for some time as I’ve been learning a lot, both about Japanese and about language learning in general. I’ve been studying Japanese intensively for about a year and a half now. By intensively, I mean probably 2-3 hours per day on average, not including all the extra practice I get from listening to people around me, watching TV etc. After a year and a half I can confidently say that… it is really hard. I tend to measure myself against the students I’ve taught English to, and by that comparison I am still a beginner.

I’ve finished both of the “Genki” textbooks, the intermediate JET program language course, and am nearing the end of “An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese.” I’ve memorized thousands upon thousands of words (although my intonation is complete crap.) And after all of this, I can understand basic things okay, but the sentences I make are still halting, half-formed, poorly pronounced, ungrammatical flobberworms of language. So if you meet someone who speaks broken English, tip your hat in some serious respect because learning another language is seriously difficult. 

It’s also frustrating because I’ll have little glimmers of understanding, small rays of hope in the linguistic chaos, only to have them dashed a few moments after. An example conversation might go something like this.

Japanese person: Oh, did you catch a cold?

Me (thrilled that I can understand and respond and dancing on the inside): A little. I have a sore throat.

Japanese person: Oh that’s too bad.

Me (emboldened by my communication success): It be worse at the night’s middle.

Japanese person: something something wear a mask something dry something.

Me: (hm, I think she said I should try wearing a mask at night) Oh really? I’ll do that!

Japanese person: wjfli asaji;sal j;l fieljflsijeilf aoea;fio;ensai;lefnia;lidfhnknelsa!

Sigh.

It usually escalates in this way. I do okay in the initial stages of a conversation, but the more I seem to understand, the sooner I get thrown into the deep end and eventually I’m left nodding and smiling, as usual.

So… communicating is really hard, but I’ve still made really good progress, to the point where I’ve changed my language learning routine to make it more useful. At the outset, I was memorizing vocabulary like a bandit using word lists and websites like Memrise.com, because I just needed words in my toolbox. But now I’m finding that approach to be less useful and so I’m doing less of that. I’ve also backed off of my vocabulary notebook because repetitively memorizing vocabulary by rote wasn’t helping me learn how to use it in context. Instead, I’m reading more. Anything I can get my hands on. I’m also trying to do a lot more listening. Now that I can understand basic things I’m trying to get as much language input as possible. I try to write a journal entry in Japanese at least once a week so that others can correct it and I am continuing to have conversation practice with a friend twice a month over Skype. It seems like a lot, but I honestly wish I had more opportunities to practice, especially speaking.

I only have half a year left on the JET program, so I’m trying to learn as much as I can before I return to the States. My goal is to pass the N2 level of the JLPT in the summer. Of course, passing a test doesn’t necessarily mean you are fluent or able to communicate, but it’s something to aim for. Ganbarimasu!

You might be wondering why I’m bothering with all of this, especially if I don’t plan on staying in Japan. Well… I have a lot of reasons but the two main ones are 1.to experience what English language learners go through and 2. to test a lot of my theories and things I’ve been taught about language learning. To me, even if I never use Japanese again, it’s not time wasted. Plus it’s opening up a whole new way of thinking and processing information to me, its allowing me to understand the world through another point of view, and honestly it’s just interesting. I feel like not many people have the opportunity to do what I’m doing, so I don’t want to waste the opportunity. So if you think I’m crazy for being such a fanatic, well, you might be right, but I have my reasons and there are rewards. They just maybe aren’t the ones our society traditionally values.