Well, it’s time for the holiday cheer to start getting to me.  I have heard my fair share of Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is You” along with a good dose of Wham!’s “Last Christmas.”  If either one of these festive songs doesn’t ring an immediate bell for you, I suggest you get your nostalgic reminder via youtube.com. There’s a lot of big 90’s hair going on…ho ho ho.

Christmas is a little different here, so I want to fill you in on a bit of the details.  Let’s start with food.  Almost everyone that you talk to here in Japan is going to buy an extremely fancy Christmas cake.  Strangely, the ordering forms are found at local convenience stores. Go figure. For the main course, it’s fried chicken.  That means that the highest selling day for the ever popular KFC Japan is Christmas. There’s apparently something so wonderfully ‘American Christmas’ about cake and fried chicken so they just leave it at that and are happy to eat a little junk food in our honor.

What else is different?  Well, couples often go out on romantic Christmas dates.  In the US, families get together and even travel great distances to be close. Here, there is a big campaign for lovers to retreat into a halo of holly. There aren’t the same Christian roots in Japan that Christmas was founded on, so it’s more of a fun, festive holiday than a chance to dust off the nativity scene.

New Year’s, on the other hand, is spent with family, and many people make special treats and have certain rituals that they preform around this time of year.  The big cleaning happens now, unlike the spring cleaning of the US. Also, many people get together to make mochi, or smushed sticky rice.

In fact, last week, I went to the boondocks to make mochi with my host family and a few other Japanese families.  A couple of highlights were:

1) My host mom’s daughter pulled a hair from my sweater and ran to her friends to give her friends a look.  Apparently, a non-black hair looked like a golden treasure to her and she wanted to show it off.

2) A young girl was looking at me shyly all day and I could tell she wanted to talk.  Finally, she walks up to me and asks me how to say “unko” in English.  I look at my host mom and ask, “What’s unko?”  She says, “It’s poop.” “Poop,” I tell the little girl, and she runs off.

Well, I am headed for Thailand later this week.  For any family reading this, I sure will miss you – please send xmas photos!  For everyone – enjoy the holidays and hey, maybe your New Year’s resolution could be to learn how to say something childish in Japanese…

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Learnin’ English

Let me start this blog out like a true Minnesotan.  I’m going to talk for a minute about the weather.  It’s still about 50-60 degrees every day and the word on the street is that the coldest time of year here is yet to come.  Apparently, February is when I can expect ice-cubes in my nose in the morning.  I do have a heated toilet seat as compensation for the chills.

Now, on to more important matters.  I went to a regional teaching conference this last week that included both ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers, like myself) and JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English).  There were hundreds of people and many ideas thrown around as to how to best teach English to Japanese students. This conference happens every year, but this year has a small twist for our prefecture. The twist is that students here will learn more English than ever before.

In deciding to teach English abroad, I chose Japan partially because I knew that I wouldn’t be infiltrating an impoverished nation with a language that they would ultimately find useful. Japan is a major industrialized country, an island nation that has capital and intellect but limited natural resources. Because of this, and the fact that Japan is living in the globalized age, Japan has to tap into and communicate with the rest of the world in order to maintain it’s status in the global market.

Japan could have chosen Chinese or French, but it didn’t.  It decided to make English it’s priority.  And since Japanese and English are so dramatically different, students need a lot of time to learn the language if they are going to use it in their future careers. With new prefecture rules, my junior high school students will study English more than any other subject.

Furthermore, students become stratified at a very early age. There are rumors that students in Japan have “exam hell” at different points of the year.  There is a lot of stress involved with these times.  It’s not necessarily that these exams are incredibly difficult.  The pressure lies in the fact that their elementary exams determine where they can go to junior high school, and junior high school exams determine where they are able to go to high school and so on all the way up to the corporate ladder.  We all know that people from Harvard had to jump though some academic hoops in their lives.  Students here in Japan, in order to get to one of the most elite  universities have been jumping through those hoops for many years.

There is a special kind of party that teachers hold at this time of year called a Bōnenkai.  The translation for this party is “forget the year party.” School is hard but teachers here know of an ancient way to absolve all the worries.  Beer. Kanpai!

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