Refections on a first year in Japan

Dear readers,

I have a confession to make, I have fallen in love with Nanyo City. It has charmed me, as has Yamagata. I often amble about the streets around my house with a sort of hazy daze about me, thinking – this is amazing. My place is great. My friends are fantastic. There is a danger in this, because when you get so attached to something or someone, it becomes difficult to break that bond. But at the moment, I can say that I’m very happy I decided to stay one more year. It has been almost a year now since I left England and entered into Japan for the first time. Now, I’m sure I’ve been in Japan for longer than all the times I’ve ever been on holiday in Europe and America. Everything was fairly foreign and a challenge to deal with back them, but now I am so familiar with everything – I know exactly what shop assistants are saying to me (and how to respond), I can give people directions, because I can say them well enough in Japanese, but also know my surroundings well enough. I know when the busiest days to eat out or go shopping are. All these small things add up to make your experience a lot more enjoyable and give you more confidence to tackle the next year.

But one has to remember that this kind of life is not really the real world. Now is the time for goodbyes to all the JETS who are deciding to leave this year. I have made so many fantastic friends and so many of them are leaving me. I imagine it will be a strange experience to have a totally new bunch of people living in the area. The dynamic of the community will no doubt be different, but it that won’t be a bad thing. One of the hardest things I have realised that JETs have to deal with, is that you have to fit into the shoes of the person who had your position before you. You are not ‘the new person’ when you arrive, you are ‘the person who replaced the other person’, ‘the other persons successor’ – this is perhaps one of the problems Japan has with Internationalisation – it treats everyone as the same person. Then again, it’s an easy thing to do – there is only one job we can obviously perform competently without having to rely on the Japanese language, which chances are we don’t know. What you have to do in this role, one of your many sub-jobs, is to define yourself as a person different to ‘the other person’. To begin with, you are called by the name of your predecessor so many times (particularly if you are both of the same gender), and then, after a while you see the cogs working inside heads, and a picture develops of a different person who has different hobbies, different skills, different habits, different patterns of intonation. Sure it can take a while (even after a year people occasionally slip up and call me by my predecessors name), but what I am trying to explain, in a slightly long winded way, is that many ALTs I think can get very frustrated with the attitudes of their colleagues, students, friends and neighbours, and the pace of the progress to define themselves as who they are. I can see the benefits and advantages of staying a second year. As is often the case, particularly for Municipal JETs (Junior High School JETs assigned to a city, rather than one Senior High School) Japanese communities want the same person to stay for longer than a year. Just as momentum picks up, and people become familiar and trusting towards that JET, they can leave, and the process has to start all over again. Because I am staying a second year, I know that my connections with the schools I visit will strengthen, my relationships with teachers and colleagues at the Board of Education will strengthen, as will my skills as an assistant language teacher and community internationalizer! This is not what everybody wants at all, some ALTS just don’t feel effectively utilized by their schools, don’t feel that they are given enough respect for what they try to do, and find living in the thick of Japanese life an endurance test rather than something that one can adapt into.

There are many situations, and the many aspects and angles are very interesting to consider and reflect upon. Japan adopted a very unique and complex internationalisation system into their society and education system with the JET Program– and it has not failed to produce unique and complex situations and relations between different communities.

Puri Kura

One of my favourite 'pastimes' in Japan - is an invention known as 'Purikura' - these can (and most certainly 'should' be) the most interesting photo booths you will ever meet in your life. Forget those boring photo booths in Boots and Tesco, that take your photo against a white backdrop, while your seated in a set position and you're not allowed to smile - purikura booths in Japan can have many people in one booth (and encourage it!), some booths have climbing apparatus and props, and you can have a variety of interesting colourful backgrounds!

You enter a large space inside the booth, choose a variety of backdrops which can be changed by a green screen. You take a couple of photographs, all in a variety of different crazy poses, and then, the most enjoyable part comes next! You leave the large 'photograph' area to go next door to a smaller 'editing' part of the booth - this is where there are two screens with electronic touch-screen pens. At this area, you can draw, write, stamp stickers, add borders - do allsorts to your photos to make your photos full of colour, garish, gaudy, crazy, zany and whatever other synonyms you can think of to accompany those adjectives! After that, you chose the best 4/5 or so, and then after a minute or so.....you receive a sheet of your photos as glossy small stickers! Brilliant! Recently a group of 10 or so people celebrated a local JETs birthday, and what better way to celebrate than with purikura!

Can you guess who's birthday it is? These examples of purikura were slightly crazier than normal - saying that, we could have probably fit a few more people in the booth! Normally a group of between 3-6 is highly recommended!

FRUITS FEST!

Yamagata is a relatively small prefecture in Japan - not many famous landmarks, nothing particularly special, a small and aging population with a reputation for having a humorous yokel dialect around Japan. But what it IS known for, is fruit! Especially Cherries. And I think they have every right to shout out about them, because they're so delicious!! I didn't really eat cherries back in England, for one hated seeded fruits, and another was that I thought cherries were quite sour tasting. But Yamagata cherries look so juicy and sweet, and the taste is very sweet too!

Nanyo is one of the biggest producers of Cherries in Yamagata. I even found a special 'Sapporo' beer can in Marie's Off License that had a map of Yamagata on it, with all the places that grow cherries!

Mmmmmmm delicious!

A quiet time in the countryside

It seems like an age since my grandparents and Kieran came over to visit, since then I've not had much money and have been trying to stablize my finances in time for my parents coming - also the fact that there are no long public holidays from the beginning of May until the end of July meant that I couldn't really go and explore different areas of Japan. I felt that I hadn't been making the most of my time in Japan during this period because I hadn't really been anywhere, or done anything exciting, but you can't do something all the time! Sometimes you just have to wait.

Spring was but a fleeting season, as soon as the cherry blossoms dropped off the trees, leaves quickly started sprouting, and before I knew it, it was becoming hotter and stickier. Since Spring the Rice Fields have steadily being sprouting up in neat little roads, and I've watched with fascination at all the farmers diligently working away to plant the seedlings, the fields looking like swimming pools, saturated with dirty water. At the moment we're going through the 'rainy season' - which, up until recently wasn't so much 'rainy' as it was 'cloudy' - I expected non-stop rain from morning to night! The rain is a bit different here though, it seems a bit heavier and lazier as it falls from the sky! It's certainly much nicer to have some warmer weather, I thought the cold weather would never end!

Summer is almost in full swing here...and it's very very familiar to a year ago....!

Tiny buds of green begin to grow...

In meticulously neat little lines!

Little flourishes of colour attract your attention amidst the masses of green that has grown everywhere

June seems to be the best morning for beautiful mornings and evenings. This was one such morning on my way to work - clear sky and amazing mountains in the background. The evenings are filled with a rich red sun, and glowing orange skies.