Nihongo 101: Japanese Classes at the Local Community Center

How many times can my Japanese teacher look at me sadly and say, "Wakarunai" (you don't understand)? She doesn't even say it with a questioning voice, only with a disappointed downward glance as she stares at the book and tries to think of another way to explain some obscure word to me without letting me resort to my newly-downloaded Kotoba! iPhone bilingual dictionary. Instead, she just speaks without gestures as if I understood, while I watch her mouth and catch maybe one of every ten words, usually words that don’t help me with meaning, words that mean “but” and “so” and “therefore.” The Vietnamese girl on my right continues to work diligently at her book, and I continue to stare dismally at the open book in front of me, half-understanding the tale of Mr. Bear and Mr. Fox and some mishap with Mr. Bear’s letter.

Today was my first day of Japanese class at the local community center, a 10-minute bike ride from my house. I was the first to arrive, a full 15 minutes early for the 7:00 class. In my best Japanese, I asked the receptionist, an older gentlemen with a yellow polo shirt and khakis, if this was where the Japanese class was, and he nodded "Hai, hai" several times. Taking a key from the desk, he stood up and joined me in the hall, leading me to the locked classroom a few doors down. After fiddling with the lock for a second, he opened the door, and my surprised eyes saw a completely empty classroom: no desks, no chairs, nothing. I turned to ask him where the desks were, but he was already opening another door and extracting the furniture we needed. Together, we took out five collapsible plastic tables and twice as many grey stackable chairs, placing them on opposite sides of the room: two against one wall, and one each against each of the other walls.

Just a few minutes later, two instructors walked in: a tall older man with an unlined, kindly face, and his wife, shorter than him, with curly hair and beige capris. The woman began talking to me in medium-speed Japanese, short sentences that I mostly understood, and I answered her questions the best I could: Yes, I'm from America. Yes, I'm an English teacher. This is my first time in Japan. I arrived on August 1. "Seito, doko?" (Students, where?) I asked her in broken Japanese, since I can’t ask the complete sentence yet. “Amerika, Australia...?"

“Mmmm,” she thought aloud. “Vietnam. Thai. Pakistan. Chugaku (China)”.

“Ahhh, soo desu,” I replied, my hopes of meeting some Brazilian or Peruvian dimming slightly.

The students started to walk in. A middle-aged Chinese man with a huge grin, followed by his younger friend/brother (I never did figure out which) greeted us with a resounding, “Konbanwa!” (Good evening!) They were followed by a pretty Vietnamese girl with long hair, who ended up sitting beside me for the two-hour class. While the other students were coming in and tables were being set up, the lead teacher motioned for me to sit at a desk and register for the class.

The registration form was bilingual, but I attempted to respond in Japanese to all the questions: name, address, date of birth, home country, date of arrival in Japan, date of departure, languages spoken, etc. It was the smiling Chinese man’s first day in class also, so he sat beside me and filled out his own form in impeccable kanji (Lucky duck, I thought, he’s been writing with Chinese characters his whole life.) He looked up at me. “Kanji wa muzukashii ne?” (Kanji is hard, huh?) he asked. I smiled, thinking, “Yes, yes it is.”

After we finished filling out the forms and paying our 500 yen (~$5.00) with the round gold coin that would be used for the cost of copies, all the students and teachers formed a circle in the empty space in the middle of the room. There were about eight students and five teachers. The lead teacher bowed to everyone with a “Konbanwa,” and we bowed back. He said a few words that I didn’t understand, then introduced himself. Afterwards, he motioned to the man on his left to continue.

It was the same man who had sat beside me at the registration desk. His Japanese, albeit with a slight Chinese accent, was almost perfect, from what I could tell. He spoke for one or two minutes, saying his name and some other things that went over my head completely. When he finished, everyone applauded.

Then it was my turn. Stumbling a little, and suddenly nervous that everyone was staring at me, I slowly said that my name was Jaimie Foster, that I was from America, that I taught English at a middle school here, that it was my first time in Japan, and that my Japanese was really bad and I was sorry for it. I finished with a bow and a “doozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu” (literally, please be nice to me, an expression used with introductions) and everyone applauded again. I felt a little better.

The rest of the introductions went quicker. The man on my left was from Thailand, and seemed comfortable with Japanese. The teachers also introduced themselves, although as soon as they said their names I promptly forgot them. The Vietnamese girl, whose name is Sakura, talked for a while in heavily accented Japanese that still made sense to me. Maybe it’s easier to understand foreigners speaking a foreign language. . .

After we finished our introductions, the lead teacher looked at me, said something, and waited for my answer. I stood still, a little bewildered, waiting for some non-verbal cue to tell me what to do. Another teacher, a short Japanese woman with glasses, motioned for me to cross the room and join her. I walked over and stood beside her, only then realizing that they were pairing up teachers and students for the evening. We all dispersed to various corners of the classroom, one or two students per teacher. I sat on one side of the small table with Sakura; our teacher sat across from us.

“What books have you brought?” she asked me in Japanese. I reached into my backpack and pulled out Japanese for JETs, Genki Book 1, Essential Japanese for ALTs, and a kanji workbook. “OK,” she nodded, and asked Sakura the same question. “Very good,” she told us, and immediately handed us each a thin paperback textbook that had been sitting on the desk. I returned my books to my backpack.

I looked at it. “Kokugo: ichinensei.” A first-graders’ Japanese book, the green cover bright with a white anime bear holding an apple, surrounded by heart-shaped leaves. Well, I thought, You’ve gotta start somewhere, I guess.

“Read, please,” our teacher instructed us. “I'm going to go make copies.”

I opened the cover. The first page repeated the title and had a picture of a rainbow-striped spider sitting on his web, with raindrops falling around him. This was followed by a table of contents (mokuji), and then the first story.

“Mr. Bear and Mr. Fox,” I read. “Oh.”

“Mr. Bear went out to mail a letter. ‘It’s a beautiful day. I feel nice.’ Something something something Mr. Fox walking. Su-ta-ta-su-ta-ta” (pitter patter, maybe?) “Mr. Bear looked at Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox looked at Mr. Bear. The two something something something friends.”

“Wakarimasuka? (Do you understand?)” asked my teacher kindly when she returned with a stack of printed copies.

I picked up a pen and wrote “70%” on a sheet of paper. She laughed.

“What don’t you know?”

I pointed at a few words. “Are they friends or not?” I asked, not quite as eloquently as I would have liked to: Friends? Yes? No?

“Jyanai (They are not friends).”

“Ahhhh, okay, thanks.”

A few sentences later, I asked her again for help with another word, which she tried to explain. This time, there was less success. I stared at her blankly. “Wakarunai,” she whispered. She sat for a while. Then she said what I believe was an explanation of what happens when two verbs connect in Japanese. This was what I wanted to learn, and I tried to ask a question. “Why?” I wanted to know. Why do you sometimes put “ni” between two verbs, but sometimes “te”? I immediately regretted asking the question, though, because she launched into a heavily-worded explanation that I couldn’t even attempt to follow. “Dajoubu desu,” I said, going back to the book and trying not to sigh heavily. “It’s okay.”

I kept reading. As I sat there, though, struggling to make sense of the hiragana and the unpronounceable kanji, I kept thinking about everything I have learned about adult second language acquisition over the past ten years. Aim for 80% success. Too little success and the student gets frustrated. Too much success and the student is bored. Students don’t need to understand every word in a passage, as long as they understand the main idea. Make the classes relevant. Don’t use children’s books. Use materials appropriate for adults and their daily life in another country. Thinking all of this and wishing desperately for an interpreter, I pointed at a word that my sensei had been unable to explain to me.

“Taisetsu desuka?” (Is it important?) I asked her. Now it was her turn to look bewildered. She seemed confused by the question. “Meishi desuka? (Is it a noun?)" I tried again. She nodded.

“I Japan here,” I tried. “I want to learn. Important.” I stopped. I could feel tears of frustration prickle my eyes. How could I explain to her what I wanted to say? That reading about Mr. Bear and Mr. Fox was not going to help me go to the post office and ask for stamps. That it wasn’t going to help me get on the right bus, or withdraw money from my bank account, or ask where the vinegar is in the grocery store. Yes, reading is important, it helps with fluency and certainly with recognizing kanji, but even a first grade book is above my level, and it doesn’t teach me what I need to learn. In that moment, I suddenly understood every ESL student I’ve ever had, those hard-working refugees and immigrants who come to the U.S. eager to learn English and fit in, but who are hindered by their well-meaning but ignorant volunteer teachers who insist on teaching as if they were all children instead of adults with real life experiences and intelligence. I am guilty of being that ignorant volunteer teacher as well, not knowing where to start or how to communicate with beginning students, not knowing what to do or how to react. And now, since I lacked the vocabulary, I couldn’t tell this nice Japanese woman who gives her Monday nights to émigrés from other countries, that I needed her help and expertise on another level. I needed her to explain grammar, verb conjugations, particles, and kanji to me. I needed her to let me use a real textbook. I needed her to teach me casual conversation. I needed an explanation in English, dammit! But I couldn’t. I couldn’t explain.

The teacher noticed I was getting internally worked up, and she put a soft hand on my book. “Yonde, kudasai” (Just read, please), she told me, and turned to help Sakura. So I read, running my pinky fingers under my eyes, keeping my head down. I didn’t even try to make sense of the hiragana anymore. I just read, letter by letter, without comprehending more than a word or two, hating Mr. Bear and hating Mr. Fox, their pictures blurry on the page. But I swallowed hard, set my jaw in a hard line, and took a deep breath. I am not going to cry here, I told myself. I will cry at home if I have to. But I will not cry here.

Just a few minutes later, Sensei interrupted us again and instructed us to close our textbooks. Sighing gratefully, I set them aside to make room for an enlarged 11 x 17 copy of two textbook pages, containing 50 typed questions.

“Wakaru?” she asked me politely. Do you understand?
I nodded, not knowing if I understood or not.

“Daijoubu desu,” she said. OK.

The first set of questions had to do with particles. Watashi WA Maiku Miraa desu. Sore wa watashi NO hon desu.

I got to work, reading each sentence painstakingly and thanking the editors for putting furigana over the kanji. After three sentences, though, I realized that I was completely unprepared for these types of questions. Having only had half of a semester of formal Japanese study two years ago, the only particles I had ever really studied were wa, no, ga, ni, and o, and even those I got mixed up. I quit on sentence four and moved to the next section.

This one was on Miraa-san’s daily schedule. I was supposed to look at the pictures and the clock underneath them and write a sentence about each one. Miraa-san wakes up at 6:00 a.m. Miraa-san studies from 9:00-11:00. Miraa-san eats lunch at 12:00. I did a little better with this one, but had to keep referring to another textbook to remember how to write time expressions.

The third and final section that I worked on was a review of question words. BLANK is this? It is a television. WHAT. BLANK is that person? That person is Mr. Sato. WHO. And so on.

Although I didn’t finish this part of the worksheet, I felt like I learned a lot from it. My only experience with question words had been when I asked another teacher at my middle school to write them down for me, and I only had about three of them memorized. Sensei was very helpful when I had a question and I grabbed at that glimmer of understanding with gusto. Here, here at last, was my 80% success.

By the time class ended at 9:00, I was feeling better but still overwhelmed. I had communicated in only Japanese for two hours, using and reusing the 10 verbs and 30 nouns in my possession, and I felt lonely for authentic communication.

Sakura and I left together on our bicycles. Before we left the community center, she reached into the basket on her bike and pulled out an orange. “Suki desuka?” (You like?) she asked. “Hai, suki desu!” (Yes, I do!) She handed it to me, then rooted around in her bag for some more vegetables, an oversized (for Japan) potato and two small eggplants. “From the teacher,” she told me in Japanese. “OK, thank you, teacher!” I replied, placing them carefully in my own basket, and she laughed.

Sakura doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Vietnamese, so our conversations were brief. Her Japanese is also twenty times better than mine, but she is patient and uses hand gestures to explain herself to me. We rode quickly down Highway 25, the air finally a bit cooler than it is during the day, the wind blowing our hair back. The sidewalk was bumpy and narrow in some places, and the lights from our bicycles barely illuminated the way in front of us. I almost ran off the curb twice, laughing and screaming that I couldn’t see—miranai! The switch to the bicycle light was rubbing against the front tire, too, making pedaling difficult, but we rode the kilometer or two back to my street in just a few minutes.

Near my house, traffic was light, and the iridescent neon glow from the hot pink Pachinko building tinted everything with color. We stopped to talk a little more and to exchange phone numbers. I found out that she is 32, that she is married to a Japanese man but has no children, that she has been in Japan for three years but that she wants to move to America, and that her sister lives in California. It was nice to be able to talk a little, and being with her half-reminded me of being with Latin Americans: the touch on the arm, the lack of personal space, the constant questions about boyfriends. She put her hand on my arm every time she asked a question, and when I said something particularly witty, she threw her head back and laughed heartily from her stomach. I discovered that I had missed this kind of human interaction: in Japan, personal space abounds and we are always quiet. As Sakura and I were talking, an older Japanese couple walked by, opening gawking at the sight of at these two foreigners trying to communicate in a difficult language. I wanted to wave, but I restrained myself. Instead, Sakura and I said goodbye with a friendly pat on the shoulder, and the promise of dinner someday next week.

I pedaled towards home, thinking, like I always do, of Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese (“I am pedaling, pedaling. . . . ") and of the past few hours in my first Japanese class. I felt the stress of the past few hours catching up with me, but I feel proud, too. “Be happy, Jaimie,” I told myself as I passed the garage, closed now, and biked slowly uphill towards the street I live off of, "You just had a long conversation completely in Japanese. You can do this. You can.”

And I think, maybe, a little, it’s true.

Nice Folk

(I wrote this piece back in August but never got around to posting it. Enjoy!)

I have the sweetest neighbors! I met them because the first night I slept by myself I couldn’t find the apartment in the dark, and I was going up and down the streets with another ALT completely disoriented. When I asked them for directions the woman took me to my house, which was about a block away. Since then, we have become some kind of friends and she takes good care of me. She even has a piano she lets me play! Last week I had dinner at her house, which was fantastic and such an experience!

Yesterday, I stopped at her house with a map in one hand and a “notice of non-delivery” from the post office in the other, asking her for directions. Instead of telling me what roads to take, she said, “Come on, I’ll take you!” in her broken English mixed with Japanese, and she took me to the post office! Tonight I had dinner at her house as well. We had a grand old time; she taught me how to write my address in kanji (quite an impressive feat) and I showed her pictures of my family and friends. I mentioned that I had to go to Shibukawa on Friday, and she says, “Oh, I know a bus that goes to there” and proceeds to put me in her car so she can take me to the nearest bus stop, just so I’ll be sure what time to leave.

I’ve had a lot of people be so nice to me here, even when they might want to strangle me for not knowing any better. The other day I was taking the train to Maebashi, and I asked a girl standing on the platform, “Does this train go to Maebashi?” (in Japanese, thank you very much!) She nodded and we ended up in the same car. When the train stopped and an announcement was made over the loud speaker, I sat there like a fool while everyone else got off the train, and she came back for me and said, “Maebashi, right?” and signaled for me to follow her. Apparently we had to switch cars but I didn’t know it. It’s so nice to have people, random strangers that I might never bump into again, make sure that I get to where I’m going okay.

I appreciate that kindness more than I can ever express to them with my doe eyes and “Doomo arigatou gozaimasu”es, because there aren’t words enough to express the feeling of relief that someone is helping you when you alone would be going the wrong way. Thank you, Japan, for providing me with kind people along this track. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Hello, Internet!

Just a quick note to say I have internet in my house, now! The guy from NTT knocked on my door at 11:30 this morning, spoke really quickly in Japanese, in which I only understood "You're Jaimie Foster, right?" and came in, searching for my phone jack. He looked at me and kept talking, while I was scrambling for my cell phone to call my host mom. I finally got ahold of her, and he related to her that it would take an hour or two to finish his work, and that I could leave if I wanted to. So I left, and when I came back an hour later, he was gone and a nice happy box with a blue ethernet wire connected to it was sitting on the floor near the jack. My friend who spent the night last night had done this before, so she quickly programmed my computer, typed in my password, and suddenly "CONNECTED" flashed on the screen. And oh! the bliss, the joy, the rapture, that I can use my computer with its real keyboard, and watch movies and TV shows, and finally download that huge Japanese-English dictionary file that I've been coveting for two weeks. Ureshii desu!!! (I am happy!!!) I can finally write long emails again!

School (Again) and Unorganized Thoughts

I don't have much time, but I thought I'd write a bit about school. It's going really well. So far I've taught about 10 classes, the same lesson every time with just a few variations, and I think I've got it down pat by now! I could probably do it in my sleep--! It's my self-introduction, in which I tell the class about my family, my city, my cat, of course, the food I like (they love hearing about mole--"Ugh! Chocolate sauce on chicken!?!"), and everything else. Then they get in groups and write questions for me; I can't count how many "Do you have boyfriend?" questions I get. I think I get 3 or 4 in each class every time.
The schedule changes a lot here, especially since we just got back from summer vacation. So for one day, Tuesday's schedule will really be Wednesday's schedule, but in reverse order, or Thursday's schedule will be Monday's 1st, 2nd, and 3rd period, but Friday's 4th, 5th, and 6th. I get confused so I just wait for my team teacher to come get me and tell me when and where we're teaching.
Yesterday I went with the Special Ed. students to make edamame. It was a lot of fun, especially when the lead teacher started writing in romaji on the board, as if I could understand "arau" better than the real characters. (I learned it means "wash.")
I love hearing the school band play every afternoon. For the few days before the performance that I wasn't invited to, I would walk to my car with the strains of Sibelius's "Be Still My Soul" (not sure its real name...) wafting through the window. It was beautiful, and to be a middle school band, they're great!
I'm trying to study Japanese every day, but sometimes I get frustrated and quit. I'm getting there, though! I even was able to ask the librarian in Japanese if a certain book was in the library, and she understood me! Hooray for small victories!

This weekend one of my friends and I are going to a restaurant with some other ALTs, then she's spending the night a la middle school. Tomorrow morning, hopefully, the NTT folk will be at my house with an internet connection, and then tomorrow evening I have a shopping date with a Japanese girl. I've been passing out my email address like a fiend; any time I go shopping and the salesgirl speaks English, I get her number! (Well, it's happened twice...) I'm going to hang out with the girl who sold me the couch next Friday, and with the girl who works at Lush next week sometime. I think this could be the start of some good language exchanging! Speaking of language learning, I start my Japanese classes at the community center on Monday night. The center is only a few blocks from my house, a good bike ride away.

I'm exploring the area on my bike in the evenings. I knew there was a park near my house, but I didn't know how beautiful or vast it was! There is a pond in the middle with paddle boats, and a tumbling waterfall that runs into a small creek. There are already leaves on the ground like it was fall, although it's in the mid-90s almost every day. We just got (another) advisory that it'll be over 100 next week--oh, autumn, doko desuka?!

If all goes according to plan, my next update will be from my computer at my house, but of course you never know what could happen.....

I hope everyone who's reading this is well, and that you would let me know if you read this blog. I'm trying to see who's interested....

First Day of School

Well, not exactly the first day teaching, but the first day with all the kids back.

So I come into school at 8:00, someone hands me a cup of hot tea (nice!) and then we go into the gym for the opening speeches. The students file in silent as mice, all in their uniforms of navy blue pants/skirts and white blouses/shirts, with navy blue ties. They file up and sit down on the gym floor in orderly rows that American kids couldn't do if they tried (or maybe after much prodding they could). The principal says some opening remarks that I don't understand, he passes out some awards certificates, which the students accept with a bow to the principal and a bow to the student body, who responds with subdued applause. Then the principal motions to me to come onto the stage. I pick up a few things that he says: "This is the new ALT. She's from North Carolina. This is her first time in Japan" and some other things that I don't understand. Then it's my turn to speak.

I look at my prepared romaji speech in front of me. I smile. I say, "Ohayo gozaimasu!" in my cheerful American voice. The students respond with a less boisterous "Ohayo gozaimasu." I start my speech, first in Japanese, which I read slowly, painstakenly, and with a few errors I'm sure, and then in English:

Good morning, my name is Jaimie Foster.
I am from North Carolina in America.
I am an ALT.
I speak English and Spanish and will work hard to learn Japanese.
This is my first time in Japan.
I am very happy to be working with all of you and I hope we have a happy relationship.
Thank you very much.

You can go ahead and laugh now at my beautiful, broken nihongo.

Then I go back, the principal speaks for maybe 10 more minutes about working hard and being dedicated to the school, then the students file out as quietly as they came.

I am shocked at how quiet they are during assemblies. Assemblies in my middle school were ridiculously loud.

Now I am working on my 1-page newspaper to put up around the school, and preparing for tomorrow's lesson (today the kids have tests all day so no teaching).

I'll let you know how things go!

Oh, the other day the kids at club activities had shaved ice raspados and they were delicious!!!

.....

Lunch.

Japanese school lunch is about 30,000 times better than American lunch, but it's a much different presentation.

At 12:15, a crew of kitchen folk came into the staff room loaded down with trays and bowls and plates of steaming things that smelled good. About 5 or 6 teachers, me included, went to help them put the food onto plates and carry them to the other staff. There were about 20 plates to fill: a bowl of white rice, a bowl of shrimp and vegetable soup, a salad with lettuce, corn, peanuts (?) and a delicious sauce, and half of a frozen apple. We also had a box of milk (100%, which I haven't had in a while and that tasted like straight cream) and a cup of hot green tea (ocha). However, once we sat the trays in front of the respective teachers, no one ate.

Indeed, no one ate until 12:45, when the bell rang signaling the end of 4th period. That's when the other teachers showed up from their 4th period class, and everyone was able to eat together. Luckily my milk was still cold and my food was still mostly hot, even after a 20 minute rest.

Afterwards, we tore our milk cartons apart, rinsed them out and placed them in a basket to be recycled, dumped the rest of our food in one big container (either for tomorrow's soup or the pigs, hahaha), and washed our personal tea mugs and chopsticks/forks. There isn't a towel to dry your dishes off on, though; you have to bring your own. Which I didn't have today. But I will tomorrow. (There actually aren't hand drying towels in this whole country, I've noticed, except at nicer stores or restaurants. Otherwise, it's just water, but no soap or hand towels.)

Oishii!!!!

Daily Life

In Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Augustus McRae tells a disconsolate Lorena, sobbing because she wants to escape from an empty Texas town for California, that “life in San Francisco is still just life.” And life in Japan, even though it’s 7,000 miles away from everything I’ve ever known, is still, when I think about it, just life. I do here what I would do anywhere. Of course there are millions of little differences, from driving on the other side of the road to not finding Dial hand soap in the grocery store, but my life in Asia is still mine, and I don’t change myself, regardless of location.

When I first moved to Winston-Salem from Tennessee in 2002, I would cry when washing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom, because they were routines I had associated with my life in Littleton. When I moved back to Greensboro from Kernersville in 2009, the same thing happened to me; and now that I’ve moved once more, I find myself missing my house on Kensington Road with an ache every time I open the refrigerator or turn on the gas stove (How I miss that stove! Six quick-burning flames and Rachel’s expensive cookware!). Every change I experience makes me miss the one before it, until I get so used to it that it becomes the routine I miss when I go somewhere else. Surely when I leave next summer, I will find myself flailing in whatever other place I end up in, longing for my futon on the floor and the breeze rolling in through open windows . . .

This feeling of “I-could-be-anywhere” first hit me on the trip to Mt. Fuji, listening to M.I.A. sing “Paper Planes” like I was back in North Carolina with Jon and Jonathan on the way to Roxboro, when we listened to that song 10 times in a row. Since then, I feel almost surprised when I step outside and see that I am not just anywhere, but here. Two nights ago, on the drive back from Shibukawa, a town 11 kilometers from my house where I had gone to eat ramen with a group of friends, I was surprised at the sense of familiarity that I felt. Me, my car, my iPod playing my music, the 2-lane road that reminds me of 158-E going to the beach—it all seemed the same, even though it isn’t.

Yesterday was Saturday, my first Saturday alone in my apartment, and I spent it just like I would if I were living on Brown Stone Court, Mayflower Avenue, or Kensington Road: cleaning. Usually I play movies while I clean, so I can have something to listen to; yesterday, I chose Lonesome Dove (hence the reference earlier) out of the five movies I brought with me to Japan, and I got through almost half of the six-hour epic before giving up for the day. (I can’t wait until I have internet in my house and can stream YouTube videos! Or maybe I need to bite the bullet and get a Japanese television and DVD player so I can watch movies here. . . unfortunately Hulu and nbc.com don’t work in Japan.)

I did laundry (referring to my Japanese-English cheat sheet on the wall to remind me of what all the buttons mean), hung up my clothes outside on the balcony to dry (no dryer), and straightened up. I cleaned out all the cabinets and rearranged the kitchen, throwing out my predecessors’ scratched-up Teflon pots and pans and making a list of replaceables. I organized the tiny kitchen the way I want it to be: food, glasses and plates on the shelf, cleaning supplies under the sink, utensils in the drawer. I swept—albeit with a plastic-bristled broom—the kitchen floor, vacuumed the rug covering the hardwood floor in the living room, and cleaned the tatami mat in the bedroom. Everywhere I live, I’m never finished cleaning.

Tomorrow, Monday, starts the real routine. Classes start after summer break, and I will be at work from 8:00-4:30 every day. On September 6^th, I start weekly Japanese classes at the local community center, and I’m also going to start doing yoga once a week either at Brain Yoga or NSM Yoga, the only two yoga studios I’ve found so far. My three girlfriends and I are continuing our weekly dinners as well.

I’m also excited because I bought a couch—a real couch!—that will be delivered on September 9. I stay on the floor almost all the time here, and I am ready to be more than a couple inches off of it. The couch is cozy and comfortable, soft, beige, and three-cushioned, which will go under my window in the living room, where I can prop up and read all night long by the light of the moon if I want to.

I’ve been reading more than usual recently: I finished the last 100 pages of The House of the Spirits (in Spanish, of course!) in a day, and I devoured three Ray Bradbury books in two. Now I’m halfway through A Little Princess, a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and A Beautiful Mind, even though I never saw the movie. Great Expectations and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong also await me. There is a small library at the international center at City Hall, where I can check out free books for up to three months! I’ve also been watching True Blood like a fiend, and wonder how I’m going to get Season Three after I finish Season Two . . .

It’s been about a month since I’ve been living in Japan, and things are starting to settle down some. In a way, this experience is just like moving to any new city for the first time: trying to meet people (I even got the girl’s number who sold me the couch because she speaks English!), learning my way around the city (so far I know Hwy. 25 and Hwy. 17 in a confusing sprawl of streets with no names), and finding out what there is to do besides go home at 8:30 every night. Even though living here is vaguely reminiscent of living anywhere else, what with the garbage removal and the grocery shopping and the figuring out how to say “Fill ‘er up” in Japanese to the gas station attendant, I have high hopes for this next year. I wonder what I will write at the end of September, at the end of October, at the end of May.

I hope to write more soon.

Mt. Fuji Part Two

Starting Part Two….picking up from where I stopped last time…

The rest of the ALTs came back to the cars around 11:00 a.m., and we drove to the hostel we were going to stay at. Instead of sleeping, though, some of us (a Canadian girl, an American guy, and two British guys) drove to McDonald’s for lunch—I know, embarrassing. When we got back, more people were getting ready to go to the onsen, a Japanese public bath. So I decided to go.

I wasn’t sure what to expect: naked public bathing isn’t really in American culture so I had no reference for it. However, it was much cooler and much less uncomfortable than I had thought. There were five of us English-speakers to begin with, and as we were leaving, a couple more JETs came in.

This is how it worked: we walked into the building, took off our outside shoes and barefooted or in sock feet walked to the counter, where we told the man that we wanted a bath. He rented towels for 200 yen, and after we paid for everything, we went into the women’s section. It was kind of like a locker room, but fancier and more Japanese, with pretty woven baskets to put your belongings in, or, if you don’t trust your co-bathers, rented lockers with locks on them. My friends and I stripped naked, gathered our towels (which maybe we weren’t supposed to do, since I didn’t see anyone else with towels…) and walked into the actual bathing area, separated from the changing room by two sets of double glass doors.

The bathing area was huge. A row of sit-down showers were against two walls; each cubicle had a plastic stool to sit on, a mirror, big containers of shampoo, conditioner, and body soap, a faucet and a removable showerhead. Besides the shower sections was a gigantic pool of hot water about two and a half or three feet deep, and another hot-tub-esque pool of bubbling water. There were women at almost all of the showers, but I found an empty one, sat down on the stool and lathered up. (One must be clean before entering the bath!) After rinsing off –you NEVER get into the tub soapy or dirty!—I padded along to the first tub and sunk down into the richest (in the Spanish sense of rico) bath I’ve ever taken. The water was the perfect temperature of hot, and even though I had a slight sunburn, it felt delicious on my sore muscles.

After resting there for about 10 minutes, I went outside to the open-air tubs, and joined my friends at one. It was part of an enclosed patio surrounded by trees and plants. I felt like royalty soaking in a warm bathtub under a clear blue sky, soaking up the water and the sun. After another 10 minutes, I went to explore another outside tub, shaped like a gigantic stone soup bowl filled to the brim and overflowing with the water that constantly poured in from an open spigot. How to describe: the blue sky, the slight breeze, the not-as-hot-as-Gunma sun, the sound of the water flowing into the tub. . . ? One would think being naked in front of your new friends and a couple of perfect strangers would be strange, but the fact that everyone is naked makes it a little easier.

After soaking in the various pools, we got up to go. I got dressed and went to wait for my friends in the waiting room, where I tried out a “jacket massager”: a little coat that beats out a rhythm onto your back and shoulders with a little hammer. I still hadn’t slept by this time (it was 3:30 p.m. and I had been awake for almost 32 hours) but the water and the heat made me even sleepier. Straight upon returning to the hostel I fell sound asleep for two hours on my hot top bunk in the 8-bed room.

Dinner consisted of conveyor belt sushi, much like what I had had with my host family a few weeks ago, except this time it wasn’t 100 yen sushi (~$1) but 100-800 yen, depending on what color plate you chose. (Interesting side note: waitresses in restaurants like these have a cool apparatus that scans your stack of used plates and automatically totals the cost.)

We got back to the hostel around 8:30 p.m. and I was sound asleep by 8:45.

The next day, well-rested, we were awoken at 7:00 a.m. by charming classical music that started playing softly, but gradually increased in volume until the proprietor was certain every person in the sleeping quarters was awake. We left the hostel for Fuji-Q (or Fuji-Kyu, depending on where you see it written) Highland, an amusement park like Kings Dominion/Carowinds but with less rides. Everyone made a beeline for the tallest, scariest, twistiest, up-side-down-iest one, but three of my friends and I declined politely and went to another one—still wickedly high and made my heart go into my throat. I ended up riding three roller coasters, and I wonder if my roller coastering days are over . . . .

Lunch was pizza and fries from Pizza-La, which had weird combinations like a meal of 2 slices of pizza, fries, and chicken nuggets, but no drink. There were also pizzas with corn on them and pizzas with cut up hot dogs on them, which I didn’t try.

It was a fun day, but we had to leave early so the boys in my car could catch their train back. There was terrible, bumper-to-bumper traffic most of the way back, and to pass the time we played a Japanese word game where you have to make a word out of the last letter of the word the previous person said, without using a word that ends with n (i.e. “ramen” or “gohan” is off-limits). So the game goes like this: one person says, “Go-mi” (trash), the next person says “Migi” (right, not left), the third person says a word that starts with “gi” that I can’t think of now. We also played some game that involves everyone putting their hands into fists with the fingers together so the thumbs can come up easily. You say some special word in Japanese that I’ve forgotten now as I’m typing this, and end with a number that isn’t higher than the number of thumbs possible (so the three people playing have six thumbs in total). At the same time that you say whatever that magical last word is, everyone raises one or two thumbs, and the person whose turn it is guesses what the number of thumbs raised will be. For example, if the person whose turn it is says, “Magical word – san! (three)” and there are three thumbs up, he wins that round. If there are not three thumbs up, it’s the next person’s turn. When you lose a round you take away a hand. Somehow I ended up winning, and I can barely count to ten in Japanese—impressive!

Unfortunately, we were so late getting back that I missed the last bus and the boys missed their last train. I took a $30 taxi home, but couldn’t tell the driver how to get to my apartment, so I just said, “Koko, onegaishimasu” (Here, please) and walked the rest of the ten minutes home, using my Fuji walking stick and ignoring my screaming legs.

And that was my Mt. Fuji weekend.