Today was a shitty day to be an ALT. I went to teach at my local high school just as I have done many times today but today was just a little bit different. I can speak Japanese so today my teacher put me in charge of reviewing a few chapters while she was helping out some other students with an unrelated test. I thought it would be fine but honestly the class was a total failure. The text book that they are using is a total mess. I can't follow what it wants to teach. It jumps around from grammar point to grammar point and there is no theme for each chapter so it is really hard to just review what the content it is.
I wound up just stopping in my middle of reviewing and just talking to the students about cherry blossom viewing. I asked them if they thought americans did anything like that and most of them were correct in saying no, no one does that in America. That class wasn't the worst of it though. The next class I had was the 2nd graders and we were reviewing really really simple stuff and no one was participating. I asked one student a simple question like "what sports do you like?" and he basically said I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about in Japanese. The kid was unbelievable rude. I was just completely turned off from the entire class. I kind of gave up and just waited for the class to end. At the end of the day my head hurt and I just wanted to go out and take some photos like I normally do. One of my students from that high school road past me on his bike and I said konnichiwa to him and he didn't even respond. It was the cherry on top for a shitty day. It is not like I live in a big cool city. I went out of my way to learn a language and move to another country and no one at that high school seems to care or appreciate that. It really brings me down. On the other hand outside of school when I got out school one of the high school students who works at the local convenient store was really sweet to me and I think she could tell I was having a really shitty day.
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I had already spent time living in Tohoku and I thought that Hokkaido wouldn't be that different in terms of the conditions of the winter but I was wrong. The winter is Hokkaido was brutal. I had to drive in extremely low visibility, blast my heater every time I was in the house. I adjusted my life style to make the most of what was available around me.
I think that many foreigners know the name Hokkaido so they have this idea in their head that it is a beautiful island that will have you surrounded by nature and for many people that is true, but in my case the small town that I am in is surrounded my steep mountains will no trail access so exploring this area is close to impossible. There is only one park in this town that you can hike in and it is only about 2 miles long. For being known as a beautiful natural place I was really surprised that there aren't any national parks in my area. I don't understand why though. Many of the Japanese people that I know love hiking and the outdoors and I have no idea where they are going. The other day on a Facebook forum about JET Program participants in Hokkaido a new applicant was talking about how she either wanted to go to Hokkaido or Kyoto. I just found that completely hilarious and it showed me just how much people have an idea in their head about a place but in reality they know nothing about it. Hokkaido and Kyoto could't be any more different. Kyoto is an old capital filled with classic architecture and culture. It is extremely hot and known for it's high humidity in summer. In terms of classical culture in Japan Kyoto is the most popular place to visit. Then there is Hokkaido. Hokkaido is very similar to Alaska in many respects. It is a younger part of Japan with a very short history. Just like Alaska there is a native population of people who lived there and the immigrant population of people who basically took over the area. It is extremely cold and the winter is more than 4 months long. Why would anyone say I want to live in Kyoto or Hokkaido? They have absolutely nothing in common. But spring has finally come. Even though the nights are still cold when I get off of work I have the drive to do things again. Even if it's just go for a drive or play some video games、I'm happy to have the drive to do anything at all. During winter here in Hokkaido there was a point where I would simply go home eat, drink and just wait until it was time to sleep. It was so cold I couldn't play music because my hands would hurt. Also doing photography out doors in extremely cold snowing weather is basically asking to break your cameras. Yesterday after school I went for about a 30 minute drive to the next town over called Matsumae. One of the teachers at my school told me that the cherry blossoms were starting to bloom and so I thought that it might be a good opportunity to just get out and do something. I walked around a park with my camera snapping photos and even though the cherry blossoms weren't in bloom, it just felt good to be outside enjoying the fresh air. I really missed that about the winter. I know a lot of people take advantage of the great winter sports opportunities that are around here but I am certainly not one of them. Where I live is the middle of no where, but to be completely isolated and have incredibly cold weather on top of that was too much to handle. Now that the days are getting a little longer and the weather is starting to look more like spring, I am finally able to relax when I leave work. I miss California in that regard. I just took it for granted that the weather was always nice but Hokkaido is certainly nothing like that. It's strange how much the weather can impact your emotional status. I think about all of the places that I could have wound up in the JET program and I ask myself over and over, why Hokkaido? I feel like it has gotten to the point where I am so uncomfortable here that there has to be a reason for me to be here, Like I am supposed to explore my subconscious or search for what actually makes me happy. In any case, summer is coming and I am extremely happy that I will be able to explore this island to a larger extent. Hokkaido is the largest prefecture in Japan by far and I have so far seen very little of it. I am hoping that I get a chance to take a really long road trip this summer with my tiny little car and see what this place actually has to offer. This entry is pretty much going to geared towards people who are learning the Japanese language so if you aren't interested there isn't much of a reason to keep reading this. The JLPT or the Japanese Language Proficiency Test is a test designed to see how much Japanese a person can read and understand, create their own grammatical syntax, and see how well they can understand the spoken language.
A lot of people when they first come to Japan they just want to learn the language so that they can get by in a day to day environment but if you are interested in working in the corporate world in Japan and stepping out of the education sector, the JLPT is going to be a test that you have to consider. For most jobs in Japan a minimum for working in an office would be the JLPT level 2 test. This is in no way an easy test if Japanese isn't your first language. They are many parts of grammar that probably weren't covered is your basic Japanese texts and if you don't buy books specifically for preparing for the test, there isn't much that you can do to get ready. Although this is a difficult test I would have to agree and say if you aren't at this level you probably shouldn't be working inside of a Japanese office. I have done it before I wound up being free all of the time because they wasn't enough work for me to do at the level I was at. Now that I am progressing in my Japanese more I feel like there is more that I can do to help out if I were to go back into working at a Japanese office. There is no other test that will let Japanese people know how good you are at Japanese. There is a test specifically designed to see how much Kanji you can read but I really don't think Japanese people care about that. The JLPT is the only test that you can take to let people know that you have skills in the language. It kind of sucks but at the same time it is a really good thing. If they were many other tests then Japanese people would have no way to simply figure out what level their employees are at. On the other hand there are several tests that Japan holds for Japanese people who study English. The most popular would be the Eiken. I actually had a high school student pass the highest level last year and he could hardly speak a word. The JLPT and the Eiken don't measure whether or not a person can speak in that language and that is one of the problems with the tests. This actually resulted in many universities in the UK from not using Japanese standardized testing as a measure as to whether or not a student is ready to study in an all English university. Is it worth it though? Make no mistake, if you want to pass the JLPT 2 or JLPT 1, the amount of study time you are going to have to put in is going to be huge. I would say you really need to ask yourself, "what sector of work do I want to be in while living in Japan?" If you want to stay in the teaching sector then I would say it really isn't worth it. If you feel like you can get by and have conversations in Japanese then don't worry about it. On the other hand I feel that having a bench mark to measure yourself and see how much you have truly improved is a great thing. When I recently signed up to take the JLPT 2 I felt a drive to study again that I hadn't felt in quite a while. I am glad I have the opportunity to test myself because after college there aren't a lot of opportunities to do things like that. I have only a few months left until the test and so I will be studying as much as possible and be writing two more blogs on the subject. One after the test and the other after I get my results back. Thanks for reading. Being removed from your natural habitat so to speak can have many affects on you. This doesn't necessarily mean moving to another country but perhaps another part of your state or even another part of town. The people that surround you shape who you are. I grew up in a small town with a really unique feel. There were plenty of places to play concerts, sketch at cafes and even go to poetry readings. It was a unique place for sure.
When I left my hometown of Benicia California a lot changed for me. First of all I was only 19 and moved to my first apartment on the Oakland Berkeley border. I realized that I would have to work a lot to pay for my tiny 1100 dollar a month apartment and that is what I did. I became a proletariat. My coworkers were people from Mexico, Brazil and El Salvador. We all were scraping a living at our crappy job and I don't even want to go into what it was. It was beyond humiliating. This being said my previous care free artistic lifestyle changed. I was still going to school but only part time because I had to pay so many bills. I realized that moving into an apartment meant that I would no longer be able to play music like I used at my parent's or friend's houses like when I was younger. I stopped playing music. I played in a few bands but to be honest I never really enjoyed playing music like I did when I was younger. People knew that I could play the drums and I would be invited to play in bands but I never really enjoyed it. There were concerts to play and beer to drink but I left expression behind. I started making electronic music by myself and started to really enjoy that. I pushed it really far and got quite good at sequencing, mixing and even would be paid to master tracks for people. Now I am far away from California living in Japan in the middle of no where in a town that is the very definition of proletariat. There is no appreciation for art here and most people have a very simple existence. The amount of people here that I could do art with in any form is close to none. So even though I have the ability to play music and paint and do many other artistic things I just stopped. I feel like I am a complete creative rut. I have taken up photography but I feel like with the amount of effort I put into it, I don't get much in return. Just like any other of my art I don't want to be like other people, and I want to take my own path in terms of how I create. I like what I am doing but like I said I feel like all I do is take a bunch of photos, process the film, spend hours scanning and then wind up with people liking my photos on instagram and a few people who will like my photos of flickr. I like what I do but I put lots of effort into it. I don't know whether or not I am wasting my time. That is really what I wanted to talk about, is my change of frame of mind. Before I would never question whether or not I was wasting my time while I was doing art. I did it because I loved it. Now I feel like I have to think about how I spend my time and whether or not anyone appreciates what I do and although I have some people who like what I do on the internet, I am just some weird foreign guy in my town who walks around with old cameras taking photos of "nothing". I hope that one day I can get back to where I used to be and just do things because they are fun or because I want to express myself. So I have a random horror story about moving into a old Japanese apartment for you. The person that lived in this apartment before me was a single woman. The place seemed pretty clean when I moved in so I didn't really clean that much before I started using it.
That all changed when I took my first bath there. Taking a bath if very common in Japan, especially if you live in a cold area. Japanese bath tubs also overflow into a drain in the floor so you can fill the tub to the brim and get right in. Anyways, I do this for the first time and I look at the floor outside of that bath tub and there is about 2 inches of water that doesn't seem to be draining. I then notice there is tons of hair floating up from the drain. I start freaking out and get out of the bathroom all together. It was already late in the day and I didn't have the cleaning supplies to clean out a drain. The next day I go and buy rubber gloves and some industrial strength cleaning agent that claims to melt hairs so that the drain can properly drain. Before I use the stuff I try to remove hair with my hands with rubber gloves on and I was flat out gagging. There was much more than just hair down there. It was a general gathering of filth. So after about 5 trips to the trash can holding a ball of hair and filth accumulated over the past 3 years I finally used the solvent. The drain works a lot better now but still doesn't work nearly as well as a normal apartment. I know I might sound like I'm over reacting but it was truly traumatizing. I don't think I am ever going to look at that bathroom the same way again. |