Cultural asset?

One of the things that is contractually a part of my job is to act as a person who can "help introduce students to foreign cultures." It's a nice little bit of lip service that got slugged into the ALT job description, and usually takes the form of explaining things like why people don't take their shoes off in a western home, or comparing notes on whatever Hollywood/MTV exports have become popular here. Occasionally we'll be asked to explain a non-Japanese holiday. Usually Halloween. Sometimes Thanksgiving.

But now I've been asked to assist in teaching a class on discrimination. A common image of Japan is that it is generally homogeneous, monolingual and monocultural. Let's leave aside the question of whether the nation of Japan, which has the vast majority of its citizens identifying themselves ethnically as (Yamato) Japanese as opposed to Ainu, Ryukyuan, "Korean person in Japan" or general foreigner-type, can be defined as homogeneous or not. That's a level of definition I'm not competent to make or inclined to attempt.

What concerns me is that I'm going to have to try and explain the concepts of discrimination and tolerance to a group with no real sense of the existence of "others" in their society or even as human beings like themselves. It'll be difficult partially because the students are 15 years old. No one has a whole lot of ability to think outside of their own experience at that age. But it's also where they live, what they've experienced and what they're likely to experience that concerns me. They probably won't have any sort of first hand experience with anything like this until well into their adulthood, if at all. It sounds like a very nice plan to teach them about discrimination, but without finding a way to get them to internalize the ideas, it'll wind up leaving them with a false sense that they understand the situation and therefore don't have to be concerned with it.

Hell. Maybe I'm thinking about it too much. But the odds are good that Japan as a nation is going to need to have more foreigners trying to immigrate in the future, and these kids will have to deal with it.

Train of thought now boarding...

During one of my free periods today, one of the newer Japanese teachers of English asked me if the students should call her "Miss" or "Ms." A reasonable question, deserving of a properly considered answer, I figured. Given that my understanding of things has been shown to be incorrect/unpopular/anachronistic in the past, I figured a little research into modern, popular opinion was in order. Which lead me to these links from the Guardian on-line. Incidentally, I was entirely unaware of the weight these terms seem to carry in old Blighty.

Anyway, my curiosity piqued, I started looking for other information about titles and gender, which lead me to a couple of abstracts concerning Congruence between a theoretical continuum of masculinity and the Rasch model. Which introduced me to the CMNI, a sort of 12 point manliness checklist. Honestly, I had no idea there was so much interest in quantifying crap like that. Then again, I'm not a social scientist and really don't get into those "What popular series/character/personal trait describes you?" quizzes so much anymore.

But that somehow led me to look up the geek hierarchy. Which naturally led to this discussion of how Lucy and Ricky wound up associating with Fred and Ethel in the first place...

See, this is more or less what it's like in my head all the time. Start off thinking about grammar, wind up wondering about what would have happened if the CIA had succeeded in removing Castro's beard.

As long as we're talking about photos

Behold! The 1st place winner of the National Press Photographers Association: Best of Photojournalism 2006 - Conceptual Photographic Illustration: Hot Mama of Invention

Those pesky Americans...

It seems that there's yet another field that American imperialism has made enemies in.

Seriously, is there anything a corporation (nominally based in) America can do internationally without stepping on someone's toes/unfairly exploiting a regional resource/poisoning the locals?

Frequently Asked Question

It's fairly common in Japanese to initiate or advance conversation by remarking on a patently obvious fact. It's not too different from the British prattling on about the weather or Canadians blathering away about liberal dope laws and healthcare for all. But personal comments are fair game in Japan, assuming they are clearly obvious. I can't count the number of times I've heard people who weren't talking to me start a conversation with each other by saying something (about me) to the effect of

"Tall!"
"Seriously! He is tall!"
"How tall do you think he is?"
"I dunno. But he's tall."
"Isn't he, though? Tall..."

And so on and so on. Younger people, larger groups and drunks tend to be more likely to start commenting abut a stranger in audible voices.
But even people who've known you for a while will comment on things that may seem obvious or even insulting, just because they're trying to start a conversation. The most flagrant comment is the one about chopsticks. Admittedly, Japan has something like a 1000 year lead over western societies in using chopsticks as they're known today, but given that there have been crazy foreigners trying to learn how to live in Japan for at least 400 years, it doesn't seem so outlandish to me that some of them might have learned how to eat with chopsticks. I mean, no one I've ever spoken to has been impressed with a Japanese person's fork or spoon skills.
But again and again and again, all of us non-natives types eventually get asked: "Can you use chopsticks?" It's usually asked after observing someone successfully eating with chopsticks. But of all the replies I've ever heard, my friend Jort may have come up with the best one:

"No I can't. I try every day, but I still haven't been able to eat anything."

A sense of perspective

This week is the first mid-term test of the year. (One more time: the school year starts in April here.) And I got to see the exam contents for the first year students. They'll be tested on their mastery of the following:

• The Alphabet (upper and lower case)
  
• Writing their own names in English
  
• Basic classroom commands (stand up, sit down, raise your hand)
  
• "Hello, my name is [your name here]. Nice to meet you."
  

My first thought was that given the kids have had about one month, that's not much at all. But then it occurred to me that they have to memorize 52 distinct symbols¹ and 10 sentences in a foreign language. Is that too much for a 12 year old kid? Particularly one who's been spoon-fed most of the answers for the previous six years of school?

---

1. I am aware that O, S, V, W, X and Z have the same shape in upper and lower case, but the kids are required to learn the relative sizes to differentiate upper and lower case.

How much assistance?

One of the rather sneaky things that was included in my contract was a clause alluding to "assisting the school with various activities, as they relate to student life and may reflect on yourself and the employer." Now, generally that only means things like eating lunch with the kids, going to one of the school club activities and trying to take part, or helping with checking papers and recording dialogues for the listening tests. The general idea is that since we're Assistant Language Teachers, we ought to assist. Seems fair enough.

But the school I work at his recently had a rather large number of foreign students enrolled here: 3. All of whom have varying levels of Japanese. One of them is fluent. He's been here with his family since he was five or six, and can regularly be seen taunting the hell out of his classmates. Something about his ability to think in another language has made him quite clever in his insults, comebacks and heckling. And his spoken English is probably among the top three in his grade. But the other two have a harder time waiting for them.

One of them is from China, and relocated to Japan last December at the age of 15. Which left him about two months to prepare for the high school entrance exams. Now, if he doesn't pass an exam for one of the schools, his education will pretty much end there. Mandatory school attendance only goes up to age 15. Which would leave him with either trying to find a private school/tutor and studying independently for 3+ years to try and learn enough to pass a high school equivalence test so he could then apply for work/university application, or just giving up and dealing with being an unintelligible unemployable. Which isn't really what his parents wanted. Fortunately, the principal here shows a surprising amount of compassion and arranged, against the recommendation of the school board, for young Mr. Chen to re-take the third year of junior high so he can improve his Japanese to the point where he's got some chance of getting into high school.

The other has grown up in Ghana. She's not facing the same time crunch to learn the language, but is coming from an entirely different schooling background. And since one of her two languages is English, I am more aware of what problems she's looking at. For one, she hasn't had any sort of PC lessons. Most school children in Japan officially start learning how to use a computer sometime around the fourth or fifth year of elementary school. So by the time they get to junior high, they're pretty comfortable with searching for stuff on the internet, tracking down flash movies and games that they shouldn't be accessing at school, and wasting the better part of a class fooling around with the fancy text options in Word. For another, her English skills are pretty much going to stop at a 13-year old level. Her official education will never include any sort of advanced grammar, vocabulary or how to write an essay. She will undoubtedly learn how to write a report in Japanese. Japanese education is rife with reports. The kids are trained from an early age in the finer points of tracking down the most widely accepted facts, memorizing them, and presenting them again in a predesignated order. But there's precious little attention paid to using those facts to support any sort of position.
And as a contentious bastich, it worries me a bit that this kid won't get the training she needs to be able to argue well.

But as an ALT who is scheduled to be in 22 out of 24 possible classes every week, there is a clear limit to how much time I have to help her in. I am contractually obligated to be available for rudimentary English lessons. There's nothing that says I can take time to teach this kid how to organize a paragraph, support her thesis sentence, or even how to use a word processor. And the school system here is primarily concerned with making sure the maximum number of kids are as close to getting above the failure-point as they can. No one is every held back a year because of bad grades here. Everyone moves up, and keeps moving up until they reach a point where they can't pass the entrance exams.

Best case scenario: her Japanese improves enough to let her start passing her other classes, like history, science and math. Worst case: she falls through the cracks in Japanese, gets left at the back of the room and never called on, and is bumped up for the next two years, until she turns 15 and is no longer required to be a subject of and burden on the school system. And there's not much I can do to help.

Someone else in Japan

Not every foreigner living here spends their free time venting their spleens over politics and booze and their work. Some of them engage in other, presumably healthy pursuits. Like my buddy James, who enjoys photography.

Primarily of pretty, pink flowers, it seems.

Boo-yah.

My belly-laugh for the week was courtesy of:

Wondermark by David Malki! 155: In which a Dude is hit in the Nuts.

Golden Week

It's the second of this year's extended holidays in Japan. The first, in January, is the New Year Holiday. Today is the first day of the so-called "Golden Week." Today, May 3rd, is "Constitution Day," a holiday traditionally celebrated by the Dwarf character classes.
Friday is "Children's day." Formerly "Boys Day," the holiday was intended to celebrate familial hopes that their boys would grow up fine and strong, until it was decided that excluding the girls from the hopes of being fine and strong was unfair. On an unrelated note, the March 3 festival of Girls Day has not been expanded to allow boys the hopes of becoming a fine woman who can land a good husband.

Anyway, May 4 is my favorite of the holidays, "Declared Official Holiday." The government wisely realized that a five day weekend is way cooler than a three day work week where you have to come back in on Thursday.

Most Japanese people celebrate Golden Week by exploding from their homes and offices like locusts and jamming up the trains, freeways, airports, parks and shopping centers.

And me? I celebrated last night with sesame wings and beer. Tonight I'll celebrate with curry and beer. Guess what tomorrow holds. Go on. Guess.

Hint: It probably rhymes with "-and beer."