I wrote this post on Friday during some downtime. I’m in a bit of a funk at the moment, but I have a bunch of photos and posts to make that I’ll be working on tomorrow, so hopefully Monday night will bring some new content.
Today my class did a lesson on 外来語, and even I learned a lot!
Japan has a long history of importing words, dating back to when they brought kanji over from China. There are three main types of words: 和語、native Japanese words; 漢語, kanji compounds with pronunciation imported from China; and 外来語, words that came from a foreign country. For example, there are three ways to say “car” in Japan. 車, “kuruma”, is the original Japanese word. カー, “kaa”, was imported from English and can also be used. Finally, 自動車, “jidousha”, is a kanji compound meaning “self-moving vehicle” that is the formal word for car.
外来語 comes from many languages: English, obviously, but also Portuguese (through Oda Nobunaga), Russian, Spanish, and even Dutch. Within the category of 外来語 there is also the fuzzy 和製英語 – words that sound like English but were constructed from bits of real English by the Japanese.
Great questions I was asked today at school:
“How did you learn English so well?” (from a first grader)
“Why are your eyes brown? I thought Americans had blue or green eyes.” (from a fourth grader)
A year after my project in Kanazawa, most of the hits on my blog still come from Google searches for 色の名前. Obviously somebody out there is interested in color names across languages, and I am as 色好き (color-obsessed) as ever. でわ、「色の名前」を探す人に質問：またブログにアップしない色の名前情報がありますけど、 興味がありますか？ または、日本語と英語の色を比べること続くかどうかちょっと考えています。 そのテーマについてブログを書いたら読みたい人いますか？ And again for the English speakers searching 色の名前: I still have information I haven’t uploaded to the blog. Should I post it? Also, is there interest in continuing comparison of colors in Japanese and English? If I blog about it, are there people who want to read it?
In America, we use a lot of colors when studying. Highlighters help us focus on the most important parts of our notes when reading through before the big test. In Japan, though, many classes require rote memorization. As if it weren’t enough having to learn thousands of ideograms with 2 (or 3 or 4 or 5) readings a piece, English has some confusing linguistic features that Japanese lacks – like articles and a bewildering variety of prepositions – and many irregular verb conjugations and grammar points that just have to be drilled into a non-native student. Highlighters just aren’t strenuous enough to help Japanese students stuff their heads with all this information. Instead, many students use a “check set”, which allows them to blank out certain key words while studying and quiz themselves more intensely.
I’m trying to learn a lot of kanji, so I bought myself some flashcards and check set materials at the closest hyaku-en (dollar) store and photographed a demonstration for you all.
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The other day, I was having lunch with a class of fourth graders I had never met before. During the usual question-and-answer period, one of them asked me what my least favorite food was, and I answered “nattou” (the fermented soybeans that Japanese people eat with rice for breakfast). One of the girls clowning around out of her seat said “All foreigners are the same after all. They all love sushi and hate nattou.”
Yesterday I was at a school where I’ve eaten with the second and first graders, who love me a lot more than my actual students do. When I went outside for recess, I was surrounded by them and bombarded with English questions. One of the first graders was particularly impressed and kept saying, “Foreigners are really amazing! They can speak English!” A second grade girl pointed out to her, “They speak English, like we speak Japanese.” But the first grader was convinced: based on the foreigners she’d met (myself and the previous ALT), all of them speak Japanese and English, so they’re amazing.
I’m glad that the older kids have a more realistic view of the world. Well, sort of – the sixth graders I had lunch with yesterday were convinced that the English word for something is its Japanese equivalent pronounced funny. (They haven’t quite got the concept that, in cases where it is, the Japanese word originated in English.) But that first grader definitely cheered me up from earlier this week. It may be true that most foreigners dislike nattou and do like sushi, but there are exceptions – and nattou is gross anyway!
Phew, all caught up on major event blog posts! Things are backdated, so just scroll down and look for new titles. Also, there’s a ton of new photos on Flickr – although one particular album is being a pain in the butt to sync, so if a post does that “Photo not Available” thing, that’s probably what’s going on.
As for this post, there’s no special theme here; just short tidbits I wanted to share.
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Friday: meeting in 三隅; dinner with Rachel; 飲み会 afterpartying with Rachel, Rebecca, Jonathan and his JTEs
Saturday: University festival, dinner with Kayo and Jonathan, karaoke with Jason et al.
Sunday: University festival, dinner with Jonathan and Rebecca, hanging out and cleaning/decorating my bathroom.
Monday (holiday due to 体育の日, Sports Day, not Columbus Day): Costume shopping in 大田市 with Rebecca, dinner party with Shane and friends.
Coming up this week…
Tuesday: calligraphy lesson; prepping candy corn dough for class on Wednesday
Wednesday: English conversation group
Thursday (payday!): weekly すし蔵会
After that I *think* I’m out of excuses. But as you can see, I’ve been up to a lot and will get up to more this week, so at least there will be plenty to read about!
In the meantime, sleep is even more precious now that the election next weekend has politicians out driving around in cars with loudspeakers yelling their own names and waking me up every morning. The Japanese campaign period is short to prevent this from getting annoying, but even a little bit is too much. I’m starting to appreciate the long American campaign season simply for its informative yet easy-to-tune-out television advertising.
EDIT: If you’re reading this on or after Oct. 17, I’ve updated a lot and backdated posts to spread them out a little bit and put them closer to when the actual events were. Thus this post on why there were no blog posts appears in the middle of a bunch of blog posts. I live to confuse.
Every school in Japan holds a school festival. Clubs hold demonstrations and performances or set up booths and sell food or host games. The local community turns out in force to support the kids and their activities.
The festival at the University of Shimane was a little bit bigger deal than that. Clubs sold all kinds of international food; entertainment groups from around Shimane came to perform; contests and flea markets were held; and the whole city came out for their weekend entertainment. Our local CIRs even helped run international activities. Despite being a small school with only one department, 県立大 has a lot of diverse activities and students.
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What I’ve been up to since then, and where all the photos are.
As it says in the video, I’m expecting my new computer in the next few days, so expect a lot of new content then. I’ll try to pick out the best bits for the blog, but there will be tons of photos to browse through on the Flickr at your leisure. The ones of my commute through the mountains are particularly gorgeous and would make good desktop backgrounds. 
I’ll have to change my blog header as well, I think.
Re: the new icon, here’s a bit of Youtube comedy that’s fairly accurate when it comes to Japanese picture-taking…
Every other Thursday I drive out to the middle of nowhere to teach at two small schools with a total of six 5th and 6th grade students between them. I love these schools and their kids, and I especially love the drive to and from their schools; they’re located up in the mountains amid terraced rice fields, and the highway to get there has a beautiful view of the Sea of Japan. I love this drive so much that I expect I’ll be taking a lot of pictures under the heading 井野いいの – “Ino iino”, Because Ino Is Good.
My first set was taken in September at the end of the warm weather, so it’s labeled “end of summer”. Please enjoy!
ET and I have had some interesting conversations about religion in the US and in Japan, and after I mentioned my aunt being Nichiren Buddhist, she invited me to come to a meeting at her Nichiren temple and meet the priest. The priest was fond of modern arts, she said, and was helping plan a festival involving a performance from Japanese dancers from a New York-based contemporary dance studio.
The meeting turned out to be a great thing, difficult as it was sitting on tatami for hours. I was introduced to the priest and to the founder of Akistudio, and after speaking to Miss Aki in English, I was approached by one of the Hamada residents helping to organize the festival. It turned out she had done a homestay in New Zealand and still spoke a good amount of English, so we had a long conversation, and she invited me to come help with the festival.
As a festival volunteer, I helped blow up some balloons, stuffed programs, and did a little ticket-taking. Mostly I wore my yellow event staff shirt and confused people by being foreign. And I was in the group picture on the back of the program, embarrassingly enough, since they insisted I be in the picture taken at the temple that night.
I did get to watch most of the show, which was a lot of fun. First a few local groups performed – a clowning/juggling group and a small chorus group from the University, a jazz dance group, and a hula group! Then Akistudio took the stage and performed their multi-part contemporary dance piece “The Other Side of the Door”. Just like the “calligraphy-like demonstration” I had seen the day before, I got the feeling that Akistudio’s work was a little too modern for local taste, but I really enjoyed their performance. The dancers were truly skillful, especially when performing pieces as toys; Miss Aki performed a solo piece as a robotic toy, and all four dancers did a beautiful job playing children’s toys in the act titled “Love Returns”. There were a few acts of story reading, which made it hard for the ALT I had invited to understand, but the first made me cry; it was the story of “何もない猫”, the cat who had nothing: no eyes, no ears, no tail, no body. The cat was invisible but there, and he was always lonely. Even his own mother couldn’t see him and simply forgot he was born. He tried his whole life to be recognized by someone, and eventually a fairy(?) told him to watch the moon for help. The last night of his life, the moon was clouded over, but in the pouring rain the villagers were able to make out the outline of the body of a cat.
I wasn’t able to see the last few acts of the dance, as I was told to go back out and help take surveys from people as they left the performance. Unfortunately for me, I was pulled in with the university volunteers who were lining up to take a bow on stage for their hard work. I was also then invited to the reception afterwards for the volunteers and the performers, which I accepted with hopes of finally talking to some of the college students.
Rain made me decide to walk instead of bike to the hotel where the reception was, so I was late and a little wet, but I did get to talk to a few people. The woman who invited me to volunteer in the first place found someone else in the room interested in learning English, so at least I was able to establish a small 英会話 (“eikaiwa”) group after all that trouble!
At the end of the night, the volunteers divided up the bouquets given to the performers, and my new eikaiwa friends insisted I take some. These next to the candles my friends and I had decorated at Konyamachi the night before made my kitchen very cheerful. 
A recent college graduate with a degree in chemistry teaching English in Middle of Nowhere, Japan. I'm just lucky that way. :)
