Codo
Goda
Gogo
Goba
Coba
forg
flog
frags
flogs
I spork about frogs.
I spork about flogs.
International Frags 2020
International Flogs 2020
I joined intartnational FROGS 2020.
I spork about flog.
forg
Frogo
Frogs like to dance. The frogs are dancing when they listen to the music.
speach
sperch
spearch
spech
Yes, recently I have given the students a creative writing assignment. Yes, it was about frogs. Specifically, it was about a character I created, Gobo (the speckled bacteria looking thing, who is named after burdock root, which was what many of the students were calling her back when she had no name) who traveled to Canada for an international frog conference, called International Frogs 2020, to share her discovery with the world, and went to a dance party afterward. I drew up four pictures detailing the story, and had students write about each picture – what Gobo was thinking, feeling, saying, etc, and I was surprised by some of the quality and creativity of their responses. What also surprised me, even more so, was how many ways they could misspell the name of a character when it has been written into the title of the worksheet, and is on the board next to a large drawing of said character. What you have just read is the cream of the crop of their misspellings. The worksheet was titled, “Gobo Goes to Canada”, in large font at the top of the page, and yet we got FIVE Gobo variants: Cobo, Gogo, Goda, Goba, and Codo. I’m thinking about incorporating them into a future worksheet, or the next Ozu Times comic strip (where Gobo made her original appearance), as Gobo’s siblings or something (update: I did this).
The day that I checked these worksheets was one of the days I’ve laughed the most. I mean come on, I spork about flog? Can you say that without laughing? Intartnational FROGS 2020? It’s too good. So all day I was sitting at my desk, trying and failing to stifle my giggling. I couldn’t help it. I need to give them more creative writing prompts.
So that’s been one of many highlights of these past few weeks. Other highlights..
Well, I’ll tell you another story in a minute, but while I’m thinking about it..
These teachers work too much. It’s not a secret that the Japanese work too much, but I’m seeing it firsthand, and it’s rough. Overworking is the norm, it’s expected. Every week multiple teachers will tell me about how they’re working too much and need more sleep, a vacation, whatever. In the past two weeks alone I have had five instances of teachers mentioning that they’re overworking. Here they all are.
Today, I’m talking with a teacher friend, I don’t know her name, I am ashamed to say, and she tells me that she’s very tired, because she was at the school working until 9 last night. She told me, “I need to escape.” And of course we laughed, like all the teachers do when they’re talking about working too much.
On Tuesday, I stopped by Hayashi sensei’s desk to tell her about how I just sprayed some kind of cleaning fluid on my desk and accidentally got them on my grapes, and still tried to eat my grapes, and how god awful it was, and how I had to throw them all away (and I did try to wash them but it was no good), and we had a nice conversation about how Japanese people peel their grapes (they peel their grapes and their apples, crazy I know, although some of their grapes actually have a pretty thick peel) – and actually this is another little story – when I first came here I would eat apples at school and I would eat them like a normal person does, which is to just bite into them and enjoy their crunchy goodness, and everyone would be like, woah, what are you doing, you’re not gonna peel it?? And I was like.. no.. why… would I do that? The peel is like the best part. And that’s how I learned that Japanese people peel their apples, and grapes, and whatever else is peelable. I have also astounded them by eating large raw carrots at my desk (which today got three! teachers to stop at my desk. “Is it your lunch?” “I’ve never seen this.” “Why don’t you cut it?”) and eating a loaf of white bread every day for lunch for two months straight (It got to the point where one teacher was asking me daily, Steven, what’s for lunch? Shokupan? Did you have shokupan? And she already knew the answer, she just wanted to hear me say it, and I would always respond, “Yes, every day shokupan.” And she would throw her head back and laugh.
So.. anyways, I told Hayashi sensei this story (about the grapes), and then she tells me she has a headache, and she is working too much, and I told her that maybe she’s dehydrated, and she told me she has drank two cups of coffee today and that was it, and she holds up this TINY mug, to show me how much coffee she had consumed, and I was like, uhhhh you’re crazy you need to drink some water. And she told me, I don’t have time to go to the fridge (the fridge is on the other side of the staff room from her – it would take about ten seconds to walk there). So I went and got her water for her. And we laughed again, like we always do when we’re talking about overwork.
So that was the second instance.. the third was when I spoke with Uramoto sensei, who told me he was tired, because he is ALWAYS tired, because this man works at the school from like 6 in the morning to 8 at night every day, and has an hour commute to and from the school. Every other time I see him he tells me he is working too much and needs more sleep. And we laugh, like we always do. And this guy is always smiling, he is one of my favorites. He is the head of the teaching staff, which is why he has some of the longest working hours out of all of the teachers.
Fourth instance, last Friday, I was talking with Sanaoka sensei, who is also one of my favorites (I have a lot of favorites). There is something about him that I can’t really explain. He is one of those people who is funny without being aware of it and without any intention of being funny. He is very curious about things, and his demeanor is usually very flat, but not in an off-putting way, more in like a he-just-isn’t-really-fazed-by-anything way, and he has this quality where he simultaneously appears to be both serious and completely unserious at the same time. He is also the tallest Japanese person I know. He is like 6’2″ or 6’3″. I can give you a little story about him to illustrate why he is funny. Kumamon is Kumamoto Prefecture’s official mascot. He is a black, sausage shaped bear, with soulless snake eyes. People love him. Anyways, there is a video of him falling off of a train, when he is trying to walk down the steps to get off the train, and it’s very funny. It’s just a good video. They’re recording a news show where they have Kumamon go around and try new things or show off some aspect of Kumamoto culture or whatever, and he has these two guides that do the talking, and then they have some people who are watching from a set and they put their faces in the corner of the screen and show their reactions (this is typical for a Japanese news/entertainment show). So anyways, Kumamon falls off the train, everyone is like, oh my god!, and Kumamon is rolling around, and doesn’t get up, and they don’t know what to do.. it’s funny. And because I’ve dang talked about it for so long, I feel like I owe you the link, so here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6f4_OEm1bo&ab_channel=bitoshakure. Skip to 1:30 for the falling off the train action, although the first bit is good too. So.. I told Sanaoka sensei about this video, and I told him to watch it, and he said he would. And I asked him every day for two weeks if he watched it, and he always said, “No.” So I stopped asking daily, and asked weekly, and then forgot about it, and at some point after a few months, I remembered, and I said, “Hey did you watch that Kumamon video??” And he said, “Yes. But, no laugh.”
So, back to the whole teachers working too hard thing. I asked Sanaoka sensei last Thursday if he was having a great day, and he said, “No. Not great. Too busy.” And I said, “Well, at least tomorrow is 華金 (pronounced hanakeen)(which is like the Japanese version of TGIF)!” And he said, “No, no 華金.” And I said, “Why not?” And he says, “Hana means ‘happy’.” End of conversation. Well, not really, because then I said, Kanashikeen, meaning sad Friday, and that got some laughs.
This man is working so hard that he sees Friday as a sad day. Or at least, it’s not a happy day, because it’s another day of work for him. It doesn’t matter that it’s the last day in the week, it’s another day of work.
Finally, the fifth.. two weeks ago, all of the teachers had a meeting. My supervisor Gotou sensei said to me, “You know Japanese people are working too much, so recently we had a meeting about working too much.” She said that some government or specialist guy came in and told the teachers how to work less. I thought, this must have been bs, and asked her how it was. She said nothing he told them changes the amount of work they actually have, and that after the meeting, they all had a good laugh, and then stayed an extra hour late that day to finish the work they couldn’t do while they were in the meeting about how to work less.
Actually there’s a sixth. I said good morning to my friend from Shoyo High School’s office, and he was the only one in the office at the time. He is basically fluent in English because he lived in California for several years (he is actually one of three of my Japanese friends who have great English and have lived in California for a number of years). He has told me repeatedly about how much work he is doing. On one weekend, we had two days off, making for a four day weekend, and he came in on three of those days to work overtime, filling out some forms related to coronavirus that students had to submit to the school. So I said to him this morning, good morning, and asked him if he was surviving. He said to me, “It’s too much. If I had known how much work this job was going to be I never would have taken it.” And that’s pretty much how all of our conversations about work go, and I always walk away thinking, jeez.
It’s not just the teachers either.. the students are working too hard. There’s this whole business with cram school (jyuku).. basically sending your middle schooler to like four hours of extra school 3 nights a week plus weekends so that they can do well on their high school entrance exams. I’m like.. do you guys know about diminishing returns? Does this actually work? How do these students survive? I actually didn’t see my host family’s middle school daughter for like 4 months because every time we did something together the daughter was at cram school. Some of these students are also commuting from far away. They might have over an hour of train rides + walking or biking to get to school, then they have club, take an hour to go back home, and then have homework on top of it all. I have had a ridiculous number of students tell me that they get 3,4,5 hours of sleep a night. Those students are suffering. Sometimes as many as one third of the students in a given class are asleep. It’s especially bad at Ozu because Ozu has all the soccer players, who are fatigued from all the practice, but they’re not the only ones who sleep.
I learned about 黒会社 (kurokaisha) recently too. I went bowling with some friends, and one of them mentioned that he didn’t have a job. I asked about it later, and he said that he worked for a 黒会社 in Tokyo, a ‘black company’, which is a company that has terrible working conditions. At least he was smart enough to quit.
So that was a little bit about what I’ve seen of Japanese work culture.. I wanted to tell my BOWL story (not about bowling, but about an actual bowl), but I don’t have time. I can leave you with that little cliffhanger, to give you something to look forward to post #3!
P.S. I have a lot of good bug photos, but uploading here is a pain. It takes wayyy too long. I am thinking about either posting them on Facebook or making a Flickr and putting them there. I will do this someday. Someday..
HAKUMUSU 