A long way from home…

Over the past few months, I have somehow managed to drag myself, my bewildered husband, and (save for a few casualties along the way) my entire collection of books literally halfway around the world, and I now find myself in my good old friend, the city of Cambridge, where it will finally be time to start law school (and kill the run-on sentence thing) in only a few short weeks. The new apartment is a mishmash of furniture from my mother’s bachelorette years, throw blankets from college, and cheap-o cooking supplies from Target, but it’s ours and we are loving it. Even the crystal-clear sound transfer from sidewalk to bedroom (and vice versa?) has ceased to bother us. The only tragedy is our distance from Japan, which seems to be less of a problem for Nobu than for me!

In the few weeks remaining before school, I hope to get fully back on the blogging bandwagon, but things like helping Nobu find a full-time job might have to come first. (Anyone need Japanese-speaking help in Boston?) I am proud to announce, though, that I succeeded today in figuring out how to configure this blog with my own personal domain, so say hello to the new http://sitoyama.com! Sometime in the near-to-midterm future, I’ll be adding more pages and photos, but for now I’ll just stick to enjoying the new look of the address bar. Baby steps.

Protruding nails (taking stock, take 1)

One of the aspects of life in Japan that has been most consistently difficult for me to accept is the general negativity towards individuality and uniqueness. A famous and oft-quoted Japanese proverb says, “出る杭は打たれる” (deru kui ha utareru), or something like “The protruding nail will be pounded in.” Basically, the message is that sticking out in any way is a bad, bad thing.

Variations on this proverb, like “Tall trees catch much wind,” are bandied about back home, too, but it’s fair to say that most Americans don’t see this as one of their basic guiding principles, unless you count angsty adolescents. Sure, we might advise someone to keep a low profile in a given situation, or to work within the system for change rather than making violent, chaotic waves, but I think the era of “keep your head down and your mouth shut” as shared common sense, if there ever was one in the states, is far behind us. An American classroom plastered with posters screaming,  ”Be yourself! Dare to be different! Go your own way!” would not be an unusual sight, but I’d be pretty shocked if I saw something like that in Japan. In fact, the public Fukuoka city subway stations are plastered with posters saying roughly the following: ”Your manners – they’re being watched more than you think.”

Taking stock: 1.5 years as a gaijin in Japan

This great article about life as a gaijin in Japan really hit home for me. Although I don’t agree with absolutely all of the broad strokes he has splashed across the experience of being a foreigner, I fully support his basic contention that recognizing and contending with your own foreignness, whether obvious or somewhat more subtle, can be an incredibly powerful and humanizing experience. Knowing that I myself am soon to return to the states and pick up approximately where I left off almost two years ago, I have started trying to identify and articulate the ways in which my international experience has affected me. Though that reflection process is still far from over, I can already say that my values and approach to daily life have been fundamentally altered by my time here. And that’s not to mention all of the more trivial, humorous, and mundane ways in which I’ve changed, like the fact that I now pronounce my own name with a Japanese accent!

So I’ve decided to use the little time that I have left in Japan to write about some of these changes. I remember being very curious about these issues when I first came over here, and I am hoping that my own reflections on life in Japan might prove helpful or enlightening to someone, as well as prepare my friends and family for the not-quite-Shannon version of Shannon that will soon be making her way back home. But I’ve got a washing machine to empty and people to see, so I’ll have to leave you hanging for the time being…stay tuned!

Teaching debate in Japan

I was lucky enough to be placed at Shuyukan High School, the most prestigious public school in Fukuoka, when I got my new ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) job about six months ago. For those who don’t know, public schools in Japan are very explicitly ranked by academic level. This means that when I tell people where I work, they usually react the same way people react when you tell them you’re a Harvard graduate: “偉い！” (great/admirable!) “頭いいね！” (You must be so smart!).

So the upshot of all this is that instead of the usual ALT drivel (“What would you like to order?” “I’ll have a slice of pizza”), I have had the privilege and pleasure of trying to coax a bunch of 17-year-olds into participating in English debates. You wouldn’t believe how painfully shy some of these kids can be, especially the girls, but as I look back on these short six months, I can see that I have gotten through to them, なんとか (somehow). 

The first challenge, which I had no idea would be so much of a challenge in and of itself, was getting the kids to speak. Yes, you heard me. Speak. I think it’s partially that they hadn’t warmed up to me yet and partially that the normal Japanese classroom is a “sit and be taught” kind of affair, but getting them to even read sentences from the handouts I gave them was like pulling teeth. And when they had to do speech presentations, some of them wouldn’t even speak audibly! As in, I couldn’t for the life of me have told you what they were saying. So I spent much more time than I had originally anticipated emphasizing and reemphasizing the importance of making eye contact when you speak in front of others, making yourself heard (!), and incorporating inflection and energy into your voice.

Of course, their skills in all of these areas would have been substantially better had they been operating in Japanese, but I was still shocked at the extent of their resistance to the idea of public speaking. If I remember my high school French classes correctly, we had the usual issues of nervous speakers, kids who refused to even bother with pronunciation, people who didn’t take the class seriously, and people who had trouble expressing themselves in French, but I can’t say that I remember having to strain to hear anyone’s presentations. Japan is a very different place…

The second challenge I faced was in teaching these kids about basic logic. Again, when I first started at Shuyukan, this was not something that I was expecting to have to deal with – I was under the (mistaken) impression that English itself would be the main stumbling block for the students. But I soon realized how little formal training Japanese students generally get in expository writing and critical thinking, and I made it one of my goals to try to get them to see the big picture at least, knowing that I couldn’t possibly impart all of my logic training to them in the 5 or so lessons I had with each class.

If I have made my job sound terrible so far, please keep reading, because that is not at all the impression that I would like to leave you with. In fact, I have loved being in the classroom, trying to teach beginning debaters how to think things through and express  ideas thoroughly and clearly to others, the added bonuses being that (a) we are doing all of this in a language that they are very uncomfortable usingto  communicate and (b) I have no formal debate experience myself. (As an aside, this last part is particularly amusing considering that the Japanese teachers I work with – JTEs, or Japanese Teachers of English – are also complete debate beginners, so they have looked to me to explain and plan everything myself. 大変でしょう？) 

Even though I have only been at my school for six months, I think I have made a difference, however small. In fact, one of my students told me that the debate activity was one of her most valuable high school memories so far. And when they did their final debates, most of those painfully shy kids who held out on me for so long were trying to speak out over the din of the heater and the rustling pages. Some students were even brave enough to attempt to speak off the cuff, as opposed to from their notes, on topics like Japanese agricultural subsidy policy, the virtues of time machines, and the ethics of lying! Pretty good, considering that the only reason these kids really need English is to pass the (written) university entrance exams, and thus they have little reason to go that extra mile in oral communication lessons.

All that said, I can’t take credit for actually developing the debate curriculum myself; that lucky person was my predecessor. I did, however, supplement her plan with a lesson on refutation, which I cribbed extensively from Discover Debate, by Michael Lubetsky et al. I would highly recommend this book to anyone teaching debate to ESL students – I think I did pretty well for someone with no formal experience in debate, and much of that success was thanks to the authors’ simple and straightforward approach to an often very complicated and too-rigorous-for-ESL subject.

Lost, but gone forever?

I used to be able to speak French. No, really, I did. I used to converse with my semi-fluent dad, no sweat. So it was really sucky when my French friend turned up at a party on Sunday and tried to greet me in French, and all I could do was grin stupidly and spit out a few えっとs and あのうs (Japanese for “um”). I’m sure he was saying something like “Wow, your French is worthless,” too, French guy that he is. How embarrassing.

The downside to devoting a large portion of your energy to studying is that sense of defeat you feel when, despite all the long hours of work, you can’t even muster something from page one of the beginner’s textbook. I admit, it’s not quite that bad (yet!), but it’s still quite discouraging to realize that my high school self could school me. 

Hope remains, though. My French reading skills are…decent, which is more than I could have said for my Japanese skills when I first came to Japan. At that time, I had only a year of college-level Japanese study under my belt, and I had left it to languish for three years without so much as a single word of practice at that. Yet I was still able to rekindle it pretty quickly upon moving over here, and less than two years later I would put myself comfortably in the advanced camp. So I am pretty sure my ability to actually produce French is also buried somewhere deep inside me – but will I ever be able to recover it? Or am I going to sacrifice fluency in my number-two language every time I decide to add another language to the list?

What do really successful polyglots do? And by “successful,” I don’t mean “able to recognize the word ‘pants’ in 15 languages.” Do once-monolingual people actually get to the point where they are comfortable and conversant in more than 2 or 3 languages at a time?

Scrivener: A great Mac writing app

I jumped on the Mac bandwagon a couple months ago, and I must confess that this application had more than a little to do with my decision:

Scrivener

Basically, it’s a writing application that stores different pages and parts of a project in a single file. Sounds like Word, right? WRONG! Scrivener has an amazing GUI that allows you to schizophrenically and almost instantaneously switch from one section of a project to another, making organization, revision, and even writing itself a total snap.

The first time I heard about Scrivener, I, with my 20th-century Windows mindset, was really confused. “So it’s like this pretty little box that holds all of your text documents? How preciously useless!” But soon it hit me: of course you need a program to keep different parts of a writing project together without either having to resort to keeping multiple files (yuck!) or to cutting/pasting/dragging (even more yuck!).

Believe it or not, stumbling upon this program online, lusting after it, and then realizing that there was absolutely nothing on a PC that even came close to it was what made me start seriously considering switching to a Mac. And once I realized that many Mac programs operate with similar principles in mind, I was totally convinced. In other words, of course you need a dedicated program for your recipes, another for your photos, and yet another for your financial data.

When I wrote my thesis in college, I just used Word, and I would definitely give myself an F- in project management. I did the save-multiple-iterations-of-the-same-massively-long-file thing, constantly forgetting which was the most current version and what exactly I had changed that had seemed so important at the time. 

I can’t wait to use this program in law school!

Okay, geek-out session complete.

What? Food?

First, go here and read this great article: The Zen of Real Food: Keeping Eating Simple. If you don’t have time to read it, here’s an excerpt:

We’ve been convinced that the foods Nature has provided us are inadequate and need tweaking. We steer clear of fat, demonize carbs, and dissect food, then put it back together in unnatural ways, generally making sure that we never eat anything remotely resembling the foods our body recognizes. Unfortunately, the laboratory has yet to outclass the foods that we evolved with. Couple that with our omnivorous ability to eat virtually anything and you have a recipe for confusion.

It took leaving the U.S. and spending all this time here in Japan to make me realize how true and important this is, and just how messed up the eating habits of most Americans are. The problem with the U.S. is that the collective food culture – what we eat together, what we bring to parties, what we see and expect to see on the shelves of supermarket, what we consider “health foods” vs. “normal foods,” etc. – all of that is irreparably distorted. In Japan, the supermarkets are full of basic, ingredient-less component items, and people consider healthy cooking to be a common-sense, “duh” part of daily life. I didn’t know what to do with myself when I first entered a Japanese supermarket – “What?! No TV dinners?! Where is all the beefaroni??” Of course, that stuff is available, particularly at Costco (my lifeline for the first few months), but the balance is totally different, and so is the sense of what should and shouldn’t be eaten on a daily basis. Let’s hope that my eye-opening culinary experiences stick with me for a long time, and that I can finally get motivated to crack a cookbook every once in a while.