A tour of our city - Tokushima

There are TONS of tiny shops and restaurants around, so much so that you are never really sure (unless there is a giant sign) whether it is a residence, a business, or both. Actually we live in an very distinguishable apartment building but the bottom floor contains a dentist office. I have no idea if it’s the whole thing or just part of it. 

Our apartment, we are on the top floor.

Similarly to Denver, Tokushima is divided into many tiny neighborhoods. I have no idea how the boundaries are determined or where they are but they are very important. Because there are no street names or signs the only way of navigating is to tell people what neighbor you are in and what your building is called. Directions are given using landmarks such as the river or the barber shop (being sure to indicate the colors on the pole because there are hundreds) and indicating your buildings name and color.

Our bike parking and the street behind out apartment.

It is easy enough to get around by walking, though the sidewalks are few and far between if you are not in the downtown area. People drive on the left hand side of the street, when lines are indicated, when there ar no lines people drive where ever they want. This can be particularly difficult to navigate on a bike.

The closest major street, complete with sidewalk.

There are rules on “how to bike” I would assume, but you would never know it. Clint gets particularly irritated at the lack of consistency and that no one seems to pay attention at all.

People ride on sidewalks, on streets, on the left, on the right, and always extremely slowly. Cyclists don’t pay attention to much it seems, particularly other riders. But it seems I am going off on a tangent, back to the neighborhood...

Local grocery store - within walking distance.

Shinmachi river walkway

Downtown

Another angle of downtown

The city has just about everything we could need and is within biking distance. the only thing that is a slight bummer is the lack of a movie theater. I hear there is one in a neighboring town but a bit to far for a bike ride.

Shinmachi river boat tour

A river side park

We also have some pretty incredible views. There are mountains on one side of us and a very large river on the other. Just outside the city, closer to our house there are patches of rice fields and large gardens everywhere.

Kuramoto beach 30 minutes away by bike

Yoshino river

Rice field complete with inflatable people (used as scare crows)

Our neighbors garden

Lovely  (but small) mountains

 We are really excited to go out and explore more of the city and the surrounding area. I'm quite sure there is much more to see and visit than we have seen in our short tine here so far.

Shoveling Cultural Snow

I got sent to Hokkaido on assignment. As work goes, it wasn’t terribly exciting, but I wasn’t in a position to choose. And anyway, with the jobs that come my way, there’s generally very little difference…A photographer and I were to visit a few restaurants. I’d write the story up, he’d supply the photos, for a total of five pages. Well somebody’s got to write these things. And the same can be said for collecting garbage and shoveling snow. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not – a job’s a job.

For three and a half years, I’d been making this kind of contribution to society. Shoveling snow, you know, cultural snow.

-Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance

Obviously from these last couple of posts I am a fan of Haruki Murakami. However, this quote struck a more personal chord. Though I have only been in Japan a matter of weeks, I have noticed a few things about the JET program. Initially this post will come across as somewhat negative, but I implore you to wait for the BUT that leads to the main point! Read on…

The first thing that I’ve noticed is that this really isn’t a difficult teaching job. You team-teach only a few classes a day, and depending on the Japanese Teacher of English that is leading the class, you can play either a very integral role in the class or serve as a glorified tape recorder reading from the textbook.

As I look at the program objectively, it becomes obvious that it would be fairly easy to slack off, do the minimum amount of work required, and collect a good paycheck. If a person so chooses, they can show up for their classes, and spend the rest of the day trolling facebook, searching the internet, or just hanging out at their desks. The program is advertised as a cultural exchange, not a teaching job, so I understand that people come here looking to experience Japan, and that team-teaching is merely a vehicle to bring them here.

This brings us back to the Murakami quote. The JETs that choose to “work” this way – along with any other Assistant Language Teachers working outside of the JET program – are merely shoveling cultural snow. We are assigned to these schools, it’s not always exciting, and it could be easy to take the position that “a job’s a job,” enjoy Japan while you’re here, and just shovel cultural snow teaching English at school.

BUT…(I told you it was coming)

The JET program presents an amazing opportunity for all of us here working as Assistant Language Teachers in Japan. The program gives us all of the tools we need to be successful ambassadors from our home countries, and provides an incredible support system to help us not only at our schools, but in our daily lives as well. To present a cliché, JET sets the table, but we still have to prepare and provide the meal.

I am fortunate that the vast majority of JET participants I’ve had the pleasure of meeting are hard working, passionate individuals that will bring amazing experiences to this position, and will share these experiences with their co-workers and students while providing quality lessons. Whether they are in their first year or entering their final fifth year, I am consistently impressed by the passion, joy, and skill that JET teachers bring to their jobs.

I am going to do my best to keep this Murakami quote in the front of my mind for the duration of my time in Japan. I hope that my experiences as a teacher and a human being coming from a different culture can provide an interesting perspective for my co-workers, students, and my community.

If these first weeks are any indication, there is no way I will be able to give back more than I will receive. The teachers at my school and members of my local community are wonderful people that have helped a complete foreigner to feel comfortable and supported in my time here. I owe them all a giant debt of gratitude. They are the fuel that keeps me excited to come to work each day and motivated to be the best teacher and person that I can be.

That being said, we all owe it to ourselves, our schools, and the JET program to be more than glorified cultural snowplows.

Murakami on Capitalism

This is a slight digression from life in Japan, but Murakami is Japanese, so I think it still counts J.

I’m reading Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami right now. I haven’t read anything by him in a while, and it was part of a small section of English books in my high school’s library.

I won’t get into the plot or the story – if you’ve read anything by Murakami it’s really hard to explain any of it anyway – but early in the novel he writes a couple of pages about capitalism that really struck a chord with me. I read it multiple times, and enjoy it for a number of reasons.

It doesn’t feel like it’s bashing capitalism, just presenting it in a way that makes a great deal of sense to me. I also like that even though this book was published in 1984, what it has to say rings as true today as it did almost 30 years ago.

I’m including the passage here in its entirety because I think it’s interesting, worth a read, and it’s my blog so I can do whatever I want J. Give it a read and let me know what you think. More on Japan soon…

Clint

That’s advanced capitalism for you: the player making the maximum capital investment gets the maximum critical information in order to reap the maximum desired profit with maximum capital efficiency – and nobody bats an eye. It’s just part of putting down capital these days. You demand the most return for your capital outlay. The person buying a used car will kick the tires and check under the hood, and the conglomerate putting down 100 billion yen will check over the finer points of where that capital’s going, and occasionally do a little fiddling. Fairness has got nothing to do with it. With that kind of money on the line, who’s going to sit around considering abstract things like that?

            Sometimes they even force hands.

            For instance, say there’s someone who doesn’t want to sell. Say, a long established shoe store. That’s when the tough guys come out of the woodwork. Huge companies have their connections, and you can count everyone from politicians and rock stars to out-and-out yakuza in their fold. So they just call on the boys with their samurai swords. The police are never too eager to deal with matters like this, especially since arrangements have already been made at the top. It’s not even corruption. That’s how the system works. That’s capital investment. Granted, this sort of thing isn’t new to the modern age. But everything before is nothing compared to the exacting detail and sheer power and invulnerability of today’s web of capitalism. And it’s megacomputers have made it all possible, with their inhuman capacity to pull every last factor on the face of the earth into their net calculations. Advanced capitalism has transcended itself. Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshipping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It’s the only stuff of myth that’s left in the world.

            Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it’s the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there’s fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there’s formal and then there’s casual; there’s hip, there’s cool, there’s trendy, there’s snobbish. Mix ‘n’ match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It’s the way of the world – philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

            Although I didn’t think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today’s sophistication, who’s in position to throw rocks? Who’s going to brave what tear gas? C’mon, that’s the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there’s another web. You throw a rock and it’ll come right back at you.

Awa Odori

Tokushima hosts the largest dance festival in Japan and the second largest in the world- Awa Odori. The dance festival takes place every year during Obon week, August 12-15.The Awa Odori festival grew out of the tradition of the Bon odori which is danced as part of the Obon "Festival of the Dead". Obon is a Buddhist celebration where the spirits of deceased ancestors are said to visit their living relatives for a few days of the year, it is also a time when people travel back to their hometowns to celebrate their ancestry.

During this time the population of Tokushima city swells from 260,000 people to over 1.3 million people. The streets explode with music, food, and people. We were lucky enough to arrive in Japan just one week prior to the big festivities, and we were able to take it all in.

Clint was at "English Camp" for the first few days of the festival so I wandered downtown to take it in by myself at first. But, by the last night Clint was back (as were all of the other JETs) and we were ready to take it on together.

Here is a map of all locations, the red circles and writing are the stages:

For those of you that are curious our apartment isn't on the map. We live just outside the map area near the upper left side of the map.

There is one united dance that all dance groups perform. In general the music is the same and the dance moves are the same. There is however some variation in the more freestyle parts. This is the translation of the song/chants.

踊る阿呆に	Odoru ahou ni	The dancers are fools
見る阿呆	Miru ahou	The watchers are fools
同じ阿呆なら	Onaji ahou nara	Both are fools alike so
踊らな損、損	Odorana son, son	Why not dance?

The dancers also chant hayashi kotoba call and response patterns such as "Yattosa, yattosa", "Hayaccha yaccha", "Erai yaccha, erai yaccha", and "Yoi, yoi, yoi, yoi". These calls have no semantic meaning but help to encourage the dancers.

The events go on all day long with dancers performing Nagashi  a toned down version of the dance on multiple stages along the streets.  The real fun starts at night  when the streets are shut down and the dancers take over with the more vibrant Zomeki which everyone is encouraged to dance.

The music absolutely permeated the city and at any time you could here 2-3 versions of the songs happening simultaneously. According to the Tokushima Travel site:

The mens' dance is dynamic and energetic.

The womens' dance is fascinating and elegant.

The rhythm of Yoshikono is created by using shamisens, gongs, taiko drums and flutes. It invites dancers and audiences alike to share the enthusiasm.

 Some of the dances took place inside, like here in the Sogo building, where I watched from the balcony.

Groups of choreographed dancers and musicians known as ren (連) dance through the streets, typically accompanied by the shamisen lute, taikodrums, shinobue flute and the kane bell. Performers wear traditional obon dance costumes, and chant and sing as they parade through the streets.

Clint even got in on the fun and danced with other JETs whom accompanied a local dance troop.

Dressed and ready

Everyone is ready to Rock!

Practicing before the big event

Local Dance ren

JETs ready for dancing (Clint is in there somewhere)

On the big stage!!

We had a great time not only watching the festivities but being able to join in on them!

Education in Japan

Though I’ve already posted a picture of my new school, I thought I would use an entry to give a little more explanation of the Japanese system of education.

In Japan, the system is similar for Kindergarten through elementary school, with elementary school consisting of grades 1-6. In middle school, the numbers begin again. In the American system, grades 7, 8, and 9 are known as 1^st year, 2^nd year, and 3^rd year in Japan. Grades 10, 11, and 12 are known as 4^th year, 5^th year, and 6^th year. This does not seem all that different.

However, middle and high school is significantly different. The weeding out process for students begins as early as grade six. Many students take entrance exams in grade six in order to test into private or more academically oriented public Junior High Schools.

Parents will keep their students out of school multiple days a week prior to the exams in February so that they can study for the test instead of going to regular school. Students also attend juku, or private study schools, on evenings and weekends after completing their normal school day to continue preparing for entrance exams.

There is another weeding out process as students move into high school. In Japan, compulsory education ends after 3^rd year. Even though 95% of students continue on to high school, this means that students essentially have to decide on their career path in 9^th grade.

Students take another entrance exam to determine what kind of high school they will attend. Here in Tokushima, as in many cities in Japan, there are multiple high schools – academic schools, commercial schools, and vocational/technical schools.

Once the testing is over and the type of school is initially decided, students and parents have the opportunity to visit different schools and decide which school they will attend. Schools often hold an “Open School” event where students and parents can see the school in action. It is different than an open house in the United States, because students actually have the opportunity to attend sample classes rather than only walking around and viewing school facilities.

I am reserving judgment on the system until I have a year or two to become a more integral part of it, but it certainly is successful on paper. Japan’s students (and population as a whole) are far more literate by percentage of population than the United States, and they score significantly higher on standardized math and science tests.

There are certainly problematic elements (early weeding out of students, academic intensity at an extremely early age, etc.), and I will be curious to see how I view the education system after spending a few months here.