randomwisdom.com

Every year at the end of March, after the students finish their classes, some of the teachers and staff are forced to relocate to different schools. It's not voluntary. A week beforehand, or two if they're lucky, teachers are told, "You will work here. If that's far from your house, we might provide you with a tenement-style apartment with room for one person. If you have kids, well I hope you have a good phone plan. If you're a newlywed, I hope your husband/wife loves you very very much." Basically if a boss tried this in any other country, the employees would tell him to fuck off and find another job. But people just roll over and take it here.

For JETs it's always a nerve-wracking time of year, as the entire English staff can get swapped out just after you've signed a contract to stay on for another year. While there are reasons to send people to schools nearby with a lack of staff (with an appropriate raise in pay), I never really understood why they would make people leave their school just for the sake of shuffling them around.

Well, I'm not losing any English staff. But the vice-principal is being sent across the prefecture. In Japanese schools, the vice principal is the guy who gets things done; a VP pretty much RUNS the staffroom. As a nice benefit, he was always friendly with the foreigners, and was willing to take a break to go for a drink after work. The head secretary is leaving, the woman who makes sure the staffroom doesn't explode while everyone else is doing their job. The music teacher is being sent off, just after he led the marching band this year to a gold award at the national marching competition. His new position? He's supposed to teach English. The poor guy can't speak a word of it. (Just goes to show how important they consider English here, I guess.)

If you couldn't tell, I'm a bit cynical about the whole thing. I guess we'll just have to wait and see who the new crowd is, and hopefully the new VP will be as cool as the last one. But I'm not getting my hopes up.

Don't ask me, I don't know what it's supposed to say either.

I had been putting it off because I didn't want to have to slog through the new Zelda game in Japanese. Then I went to Kennard's place and played Wii Sports (you swing the controller like a tennis racket!) and then over to Tajiri Mike's apartment and played Twilight Princess. Normally, text-heavy games are impossible to play because searching for kanji (Chinese characters) in a list of over 2000 takes too damn long (or in the case of the more complicated characters, it's impossible to count how many strokes the character has because it's just a smudge). As it turns out, Zelda has furigana (a phonetic superscript). This lets me read words where I might know the pronunciation but not the kanji, or quickly look up words I don't know in my dictionary. On top of that, it's a good motivation for me to finally study again.

That's it, I thought to myself, I'm buying one. And the next day, I did.

Though it's taking longer than I expected, I've found that the only really difficult parts are those with lots of archaic speech. Annoyingly, most of the dictionaries only provide very basic words from Japanese to English, and I've found I often have to consult a Japanese-Japanese dictionary. Occasionally I'll encounter a word that isn't in my dictionaries; role-playing games in Japan tend to have those in spades, mostly for made-up or magical terms. But if you know the meaning of the two component characters you can usually get an idea for what the word means. And that said, I've stumbled my way through the game's first area without too many problems, and I think my reading speed is improving a bit, at least in the parts where I'm not frantically looking up every word.

Wii Sports is a pretty good game too. Although I haven't quite gotten used to the idea of swinging the controller itself around, it actually does work pretty well! The bowling game is fun, though I haven't quite gotten the hang of how to get the ball to go straight (not that I can figure that out in real bowling either). I'm looking forward to trying out the boxing game next. Hmm, looks like it's about time to leave work....

My third year students graduated this Friday. To be honest, I haven't really taught any of their classes this year because they've been busy prepping for exams (which I can't really help them with). But there are a few students I became close to outside of the classroom, and I'm really going to miss them.

Saturday I spent with the girlfriend, and we drove up to Chusonji in Hiraizumi. I'd never been there, but it's supposed to be one of the best temple complexes in northern Japan. The temple itself didn't disappoint, though only a few of my photos came out exposed properly.

Sunday I had plans to go with Takahashi and the crew to the Sugo racetrack to do some laps on the motorbike. The weather was a bit cloudy the day before, so I was told to bring rain gear in case things turned sour. As it turned out, it didn't rain... it snowed. Not enough to pile up or form ice, but flakes of the white crap were drifting out of the air as we unloaded the bikes from our truck and wheeled them into the pit. Thankfully, it stopped about an hour later, leaving us with a cold track. We had booked an hour of time, and the guys were eager to get out and open up the bikes, but I planned on taking it easy-- my tires were at the end of their life (I had placed an order for replacements, but they hadn't arrived yet), the track and tires were cold, and my skills were still a bit rusty from 6 months of not riding. My fears turned out to be well-founded, as three or four racers wiped out on the first lap, one smearing a nice line of mud through the chicane. After 2 warm up laps, the rest of us filed back into the pit area, and then they opened the track again after a few minutes. I didn't want to push my tires, so again I took it easy... but it just didn't feel right, the wind kept blowing me off my lines, and the other folks on bigger bikes were ripping past me left and right. It had disaster written all over it. So I pulled it in and turned it off for the day.

As we headed back home that afternoon, it started snowing. A lot. The snow continued to fall in large clumps and pile up over the next three days, finishing in an ugly pile of the cold stuff about 2 feet deep. Now I'm dealing with the aftermath in the form of iced over roads (they don't salt roads out in the inaka because the runoff would harm the rice fields). I want it to be warm again so I can ride my bike!

No, I can't say that I have...

About a week ago, I was up in northern Miyagi for my girlfriend's Yosakoi dance festival. Finally, a chance to try out my camera. I took about 50 shots (most of them on manual focus). Here are two of the best, though I have several more if any of you are interested.

They changed costumes while dancing about 4 times, all with some clever use of fabrics with different colors on each side. My thanks go out to whoever did the stage lighting, as it was perfect for taking photos.

Guess which one is my girlfriend... and no, it's not the second from the right in front.

This group performed just before the gf went on