03-15-02
Instant Spring! So I'm riding my bike to school in the morning the other day, bundled from the harsh cold in my coat, gloves and scarf. I mean, it was cold! I wasn't just wearing them to be stylish (and stylish I was!!). Then halfway to school, all of a sudden, the sun comes up and it's shorts weather!! It was really that fast. Craziness. Needless to say it was instant-sweat-city and I had to stop and get off my bike to shed a few layers so I wouldn't evaporate before I got to school. I don't know what the weather's like where you are (unless you're here that is), but spring has definitely arrived in Fukuma.
Along with spring, a few new entries have sprouted up in the Engrish section. And by "few," I mean "one."
I FINALLY got that damnable Spooman link working in the Music section. Sorry about the delay on that.
A few more potentially useless links are up in the brand spankin' new Links page.
Does life get much better than a Hair Flap update?
Ita-koto aru no?
Judging by the results of Hair Flap's first ever public poll, it looks like most of you do not, in fact, feel that I abuse the Right of the Comma too much. This makes feel all warm and full of sunshine on the inside.
For the three of you that don't know what a comma is, I can instruct you in the use of this 'grammatical duct tape' for a nominal fee. I am a professional English instructor, don't you know. :P
For this week's poll, I'm curious to know how many readers have actually been to Japan before. It will help me determine how much to patronize you when explaining things.
Have you ever been to Japan? Yes No What is this "Japan" you speak of? It intrigues me.
Random Star Wars Moment
Okay, if you haven't downloaded the fourth and final trailer for Episode II yet, what the hell are you doing here reading this!??! Go download it NOW!!! I'll wait for a sec.
Dum-de-do, do-do. Korah Matah, Korah Rahtahmah. Bop-de-do-wop.
Okay you're back? Excellent. Isn't it amazing!?! For those of you who cheated and didn't really download it, I'll trust that you bookmarked the link and will get it later. Jawdropping is all I can say about the things I'm seeing in this trailer. I can't even describe how massive a scale the battles are on. Skirmishes from Braveheart would get lost in a corner of these!
Dan had some initial misgivings about how he thought Uncle George's concept of visual innovation seems to be to fill the screen with as many elements as possible, but when I asked him if he would be satisfied if the fall of the Republic came at anything less than what is in this trailer (I mean, say the words "fall of the Republic"!! Can it really be too big!?), he came to see the light and quickly conceded the point.
Suffice it to say, I've got Episode II fever in a big way which has been reflected in a few of my desktop setups recently, which I'm particularly proud of and which are available for viewing in the Misc. section. (Fact: "which" was used three times in the last sentence alone. Did you notice?)
Speaking of my desktop, while working on last week's update, I happened to notice how full my Dock was. Look at this thing, everything with a black triangle under it is a running application. For those that can't be bothered to count that's 22 apps!! And I was actually switching between most of them, so very few were sitting idle. Holy smokes! How many of you simultaneously use 22 applications? :D
Okay, enough irrelevance, let's talk about Japan.
Wrapping It Up
The school year works a little different in Japan. The main difference seems to be in how the breaks are. In the U.S. we get a few really big breaks (Christmas, summer, spring), while in Japan, they get an absolute ton of little breaks. Every time I turn around it's another national holiday or a half-day or whatever. When one of my students heard that we get a two and half month summer break his eyes almost fell out of his head.
Another difference is that the school year finishes not at summer vacation, but at spring vacation. And as we're coming up on Spring Break at the end of this month, we've been doing lots of End o' th' Year things here at Fukuma Higashi Chu. Let me fill you in on some of them.
O-souji
If you remember way back to the first post, I mentioned that Japanese schools have the fine tradition of making the students clean their schools to teach them responsibility and...you know...stuff. This of course holds true for Spring Cleaning or as they call it O-souji [lit. Big Cleaning]. Students are assigned to different areas around the school and then it's non-stop cleaning for the first two periods of the day. Not to be cynical, but the school doesn't really look any different than after a normal day's souji, so I'm not sure if that means that they do a good job of keeping the place clean normally so that there's not much to do during O-souji or that they're just so lazy that it doesn't matter if you take 15 minutes or 2 hours, 0 times 8 still equals 0. :P
Graduation
In the process of cleaning the place up and clearing out the old stuff, they thought they would do the same with the students, so they clear out the third-years the day after O-souji. I wonder if I'm the only one that noticed that. Anyway, I actually don't remember my Jr. High graduation, so I'm pretty sure it consisted of a boring assembly with a speech from our principal wrapping things up with "Right, see ya. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out." As usual, there's a different take on it over here.
It often seems that the Japanese education system is more in place to educate the youth how to behave in society, rather than to actually impart useful knowledge and skills. This can be seen in the lack of dialogue between students and teachers in class, the emphasis on after-school club activities(contributing to a group) and the slew of insanely strict rules that govern a Jr. High student's life (I'll probably do something on this in the next update). This focus on 'societal training' can be seen in the graduation ceremony as well. Instead of my lameo assembly, there's a whole day (well, a half-day anyway) to have a school-wide sendoff of the third-year students.
It seems a lot more like a High School graduation, with all the speeches about going onto the next stage of your life, entering the world, we-hope-you'll-always-have-a-piece-of-here-with-you comments and even a lined procession as the students walk out of the school gates for the last time. There's a very conscious focus on looking at the bigger picture of how you're fitting into things as you get older, which I definitely don't remember being in my mind as I became a high school student (hell, I don't remember that being in my mind when I graduated college!! ;) I wasn't surprised to see it in Japan, but I was surprised to see it as early as Jr. High school.
And just because it's the last day of your Jr. High career, don't think for a minute that you can get away with breaking any of the rules that have been torturing you for the past three years. You're gonna comply to bitter end, my friend. As I mentioned in the photo of Masahiro and his spikey mohawk, even the hair is fair game for enforcement. One of the more rebellious students actually had the guts to come to school with his hair bleached (where would he have gotten an idea like that from??). Two of the teachers took him into the restroom with a couple cans of spray-on hair color and sprayed and sprayed until that dude's hair was as black as night. Natsuaki-sensei returned to the Teacher's Room with smug satisfaction written all over his face. "Now it's pretty," he proclaimed. I quickly hid in the copy room to make sure the same fate didn't befall my hair as well. :P
So when it was all said and done, I was sad to see many of my favorite students leave, even though I had only been with them for less than six months. Fortunately, during our final week of classes I had written my email address on the board and invited them to write anytime and tell me about their high school lives or whatever. It's only been two days since graduation and I've already received about 10 emails. So even though I won't be seeing them in class or chatting with them in the halls anymore, I do have a whole slew of Japanese pen pals to torture with English emails. Excellent!!
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