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.

Katakana is the angular Japanese phonetic system generally used for foreign words, but sometimes for sounds or when someone is too lazy to write a Chinese character. My kids were asked to guess whether the following katakana words were Japanese- or foreign-made. (Double vowels aren’t what they would be read as in English, just the single vowel extended.)

リンゴ, “ringo” – Japanese. It’s often written in katakana, but just because the kanji looks like this: 林檎

ハサミ, “hasami” – Japanese. Again, the kanji is difficult: 鋏. My kids haven’t heard the word “scissors” before, so they were surprised by it, but they knew this was native.

テレビゲーム, “terebi geemu” – Japanese. We say “video game” in America. This term specifically refers to video games played on consoles like Playstation or Xbox that have to be hooked up to a television, so it makes sense. My kids were shocked to hear it wasn’t an American term.

ジェットコスター, “jetto kosutaa” – Japanese. We say “roller coaster” in English, at least in America. This name may have come from a specific coaster, the way that buffets are called “バイキング”, “baikingu”, after a specific restaurant called the Viking.

オートバイ, “ootobai” – Japanese. We would call this a motorcycle or motorbike, but the Japanese adopted “auto bike”.

キーホルダー, “kii horudaa” – Japanese. It’s “key holder”, but at least in America, we call it a key ring.

イクラ, “ikura” – Foreign. Ikura is the word for fish roe used in sushi. Even I thought this was Japanese, but it’s apparently from the Russian word for eggs.

コンペイト, “konpeito” – Foreign. It’s a kind of candy that was adopted from Portugal by Oda Nobunaga.

ピーマン, “piiman” – Foreign. Apparently the Japanese use the French word “piment” for peppers.

カレンダー, “karendaa” – Foreign. Same as the English “calendar”. There’s apparently a native Japanese word for it, but only one student out of 17 knew it.

ランドセル, “randoseru” – Foreign. It’s the Dutch word for backpack; the Japanese imported it from Holland.

カスタネット, “kasutanetto” – Foreign. Same as the English “castanet”, it comes from the Spanish “castañeta”.

The kids were very impressed to hear that certain Japanese words had made it into English: for example, tofu, futon, and sushi. I didn’t get to teach them the English pronunciation, but I’m sure they’d be amused. And yet, learning about loan words has not kept them from assuming that English is just Japanese pronounced funny, so maybe it’s a bad idea to show them any that is!

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.

One set of flashcards I’m making is to teach myself radicals, different shapes that appear regularly in multiple ideograms that contribute to the meaning or the reading of the kanji. This is shinnyou, a vaguely road-shaped bit that appears at the edge of many characters. To the right of the flashcard are my red and green highlighters.

The stuff I bought is actually more like red and green translucent correction tape; some sets use highlighters, and some use red and green pens. Using highlighters or this tape stuff allows you to go over things already written in black, so if I wanted to use this on my workbook instead of a homemade flashcard, it wouldn’t be a problem.

I chose to highlight the name of the radical in one color and its meaning in the other, so I can quiz myself on each separately.

Quiz time!

Using the red check sheet, I can see the red-highlighted material but not the green. Do you remember the name of this radical?

Using the green check sheet, I can see the green-highlighted material but not the red. What does this radical mean?

Considering the colors used in this system are confused in the most common form of color blindness, protanopia, I used a little utility called Color Oracle to examine my photographs. The check sheets are hard to tell apart, but in principle they still work. My tape highlighters seem to be of different enough brightnesses that a protanopic person would see a difference (in the tape, at least).

If you’re in the US and want to try out this study system for your own memorization purposes, you can probably make a homemade set with a bit of effort, but J-List offers a couple check sets and some check set flashcards for fairly cheap. (By the way, those tiny ring-bound flash cards are the norm in Japan – there’s no such thing, as far as I can tell, as index cards! It’s a little frustrating for those of us who squirrel away years worth of 3″x5″s…)

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.

• Here’s a video I recorded weeks ago on my old digital camera and have been too lazy to upload. I thought I’d capture the evening song that plays in central Hamada city every night. When I recorded this at September, it was played at 6 PM; now that October has begun the winter season, it’s been moved up to 5 PM. The morning song is still at 6, I think, and the noon song is always at 12 PM exactly.

• I’m so grateful for my eikaiwa group! I told them I couldn’t charge them for our classes, but they’ve decided to bring me various Japanese sweets as payment. Additionally, one of them was working the flea market at the university festival and brought me two very warm coats that were too big for her. Just in time, too; mornings and evenings are all of a sudden cold here, and I’m starting to really feel the lack of central heating! (And speaking of heating, I dragged the space heater out of the closet, and it definitely explains the kerosene tank on the porch. I’m thinking I might want to invest in an electric model and avoid the risks of inhalation.)

• I have a 3rd and 4th grade class combined from two schools once a month, and yesterday we had a Halloween party. The kids made their own costumes, mostly out of cardboard and trash bags, and went trick-or-treating around the first floor of the school. Then I helped them make (a rough approximation of) candy corn! The homemade recipe I found at the Urban Housewife was perfect, although another site suggested low heat instead of medium. Corn syrup is not available in Japan, but liquid sweetener made of vegetable-derived oligosaccharides – called オリゴ for short – works perfectly. Also, instead of just making a straight rectangle like the recipe suggests, I found making concentric circles of the dough and then cutting them created perfectly colored candy corn. Thanks to the other ALTs for coming over and helping me with the test run; I’m super happy with how easy it is to make this stuff, and although some of the kids found the dough hard to work with, afterward they told me they all enjoyed eating it.

• After the calligraphy exhibition the other weekend, one of the teachers who invited me followed up with me about taking a calligraphy class myself. Tuesday night she took me to a small classroom where I had my first lesson. I really do have to learn to sit seiza, which is incredibly difficult, even with the little assisting chairs the teacher has. I also find the brush position stressful, since it has to be held vertically and moved very deliberately, but I know this will get easier a lot faster than seiza will. Still, I made it through the first three grades’ worth of material (writing くり、きのこ、and まんげつ), and the teacher finds my work good for a beginner, even if I’m not happy with it just yet. (Actually, I forget that I have these with me; I’ll take pictures of them and make a separate blog post about this.) Next week I’ll graduate to basic kanji; I hope I can handle it! Watching the adult students copying classical Chinese poems is really incredible. Also, there’s a junior high school student studying on Tuesdays who’s going to practice his English with me.

• I’ve already mentioned it once, but if you find elections in America annoying, never ever move to Japan. The election season is a lot shorter here, but that’s probably because of how annoying it is. The city council election is this weekend, and the mayor is up for reelection as well. Every day from 8 in the morning till probably about 8 at night, the candidates are driven around in cars fitted with loudspeakers through with their campaign coordinators constantly announce their presence in obnoxiously formal Japanese. “Good morning! Good morning! This is So-and-so! So-and-so! Thank you for your support; we will fight very hard!” Every now and then, the car will stop, and the candidate will get out and give a speech flanked by their campaign staff in suits and armbands. I couldn’t sleep in on Saturday thanks to my neighborhood candidate arriving to give a speech probably at the store outside my apartment building and then being driven around the neighborhood.

The mayor of Hamada takes time out of his office at City Hall to… stop his campaign car directly across the street from City Hall and give a speech about why he should be reelected.

My local candidate stopped at a stop light and talking to a supporter. There are two Ushios running in Hamada, so this one’s campaign car emphasizes his first name, Hiromi. I actually met him when he came into the BoE one day; he’s an anthropologist who lived in Nepal for a while, and he speaks good English. He even said “good morning” to me as I passed his campaign car on my way to work on Friday.

Today was the last day of campaigning before the election, so the cars were out in force. I thought I’d record a little snippet for you to hear. Sorry about the relatively boring view; that truck didn’t even have the candidate’s name on it!

• My students are prone to preemptively giving up on long sentences or relatively fast speech from the textbook CD and saying, “わかんない” (“I dunno”) in very exasperated tones. Sometimes it gets very irritating to them, especially when they think they’re not interested in the subject. But during comment time at the end of every class, some of my students will say, “At first I didn’t understand, but then I got it, so I’m glad,” or, “I didn’t get it, but I want to, so I’ll work hard next time and hopefully I’ll get it.” Those are my favorite comments.

• I had an issue with some teachers, usually young and male, communicating awkwardly. They seemed a little bit nervous around me, so they got super-polite, but super-polite Japanese involves some very formal words and phrases that I don’t know as well as their plainer counterparts. This meant I usually had to get them to repeat what they had said, which made them more nervous, and sometimes even more formal… Luckily, at least one of the people who was doing this seems to have relaxed a lot after having several lessons together, and communicating with him is a lot easier now. Either he’s more at ease or my Japanese is getting better… possibly both, but I know at least the former is true.

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.

On Saturday, I arrived just in time to catch part of the children’s kagura performance. Many of my students participate in children’s kagura groups, so I’m guessing I knew at least one of the performers, even if I couldn’t recognize them.

The food stands were amazing. Just some of the things being sold: snow cones (“kakigouri”), hot dogs, cotton candy (“watagashi”), tofu donuts, takoyaki, yakisoba, okonomiyaki on a stick, fried chicken, and, of course, Ramune soda. All the booths had the traditional Japanese aggressive salesman attitude in full swing, but I tried to reward the ones that attempted to use English with me by buying their product.

Some club or other held a drag competition. There were a few women in manly outfits, but mostly very brave men in very fashionable(/stereotypical) women’s clothes. It was pretty funny. When the winner (the guy at the end in the purple shirt) was asked to comment, he said, “I’m embarrassed, but I’m happy.”

The clowning group I saw perform at the festival I volunteered at gave several performances over the weekend. They did a lot with devil sticks, juggling, and Chinese yo-yos, although there seemed to be a competing club doing Chinese yo-yoing.

Chinese yo-yo is pretty incredible. The yo-yo is a large wooden hyperbola that balances on a string held between two sticks. Performers build up speed by whipping the string back and forth and then perform tricks that involve keeping the yo-yo on the string in crazy positions or throwing the yo-yo and catching it on the string.

Sunday afternoon’s highlight was a taiko group, which might have been from Izumo. There was a Westerner in it, too, and it was impressive to watch him play the largest drum by literally swinging a bat at it. The female members of the group were also impressive; I loved the way they marked the beat before a note with small, sharp kiai.

The final event of the festival was a quiz game for the audience. In Japan a circle, or “maru”, means yes, and an X, or “batsu”, means no. This kind of game is thus generally called a “maru-batsu quiz”. We play this in my classes when learning the structure “I like~”; I hold up a picture card, and my kids have to move to the maru or batsu side of the classroom to guess whether or not I like that thing before asking me.

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.