"Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken."

Once again, I find myself sitting infront of my laptop at my desk and trying to tell you what I'm thinking. Coffee warms my hands and brain, Nescafe's bitter poison stings my tastebuds with every sip, and yet this is certainly not the first time that I have done this exact same thing.
Order and repition have begun to take hold in my life, but this is not a bad thing. We are creatures of habit, it is how we handle the information presented to us every day, and the more I repeat the simple things the easier it is for me to deal with the bigger ones. The last 2 or 3 weeks have been filled with pretty much the same, Monday to Friday; a lot of work at school, complimented by a decent share of stress to keep my nerves sharp, and sweet release when I teach a class that listens, behaves and cares. I made a game for my first years, it was good; I made a game for my third years, it was the worst lesson ever. These things have made me realise what the most difficult thing about being here is going to be - trying to be a teacher. Many ALTs just have to read out a textbook when prompted, or make a game when they're not teaching in between studying Japanese and browsing the net. I am not one of those ALTs. The week before last I taught 3 classes completely alone, and it was tough. Today, I have to teach another three. The illusions about how easy my role might be here are quickly being pulled away to reveal the truth: that I am going to have to become a teacher in a country where I can't speak the language and where I will often be left to fend for myself infront of 30 students with only my wits for weapons. This is really tough, but once I come out the other side, I will be better for it.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
- Paul Atreides, Dune - by Frank Herbert.

School does also have a lot of good things though, 409 of them between the ages of 12 and 15 to be precise. In the last two weeks, I have made quite good friends with a Chinese third year girl; I have started swapping CDs with another third year student; I put one of my friendly third year boys into a leg lock; I was given a round of applause the first time I read Dr. Seuss to a class; I managed to have a two minute conversation with a first year student entirely in Japanese - she now talks to me in the corridor using any English she can think of; etc etc etc. When things are good, they are amazing, and when they are bad, they can be terrible. I don't know quite where I find the will to keep putting myself out there when things go wrong, or how some people do it every day for 20 years or more, but I suppose there is only one way to find out.

Well, that was all a little to introspective, so lets cut to the exciting things that I have been too busy doing over the last two weeks to stop and tell you about:
1. I got so drunk on a couple of pints and one large shot of mystery vodka that I almost didn't make it home and was sick before I went to bed, when I got up and again after the Monday morning meeting :) The vodka was of unknown origin and unknown age - all I know is that the label had yellowed with time, it was in a language I couldn't read and that the owner of the off licence my friend bought it from claimed he found it somewhere and thought he would sell it.
2. A wasp an inch long crawled into my bag and stung the shit out of my finger. My finger swole up, I couldn't move it, and then just as quickly went back to it's normal size. Helpful comments from friends like "Let's hope your not allergic" were not appreciated.
3. I went to a Kendo tournament and it was awesome. I went to watch the kids from my club perform and also ran into the competing team from my school. I took a couple of crappy photos that are available here - 1 and 2 - and a short movie I filmed is available here.
4. I went to an elementary school Halloween Party! Andrew organised the party for one of his classes, and over a 5 week period he spent aproximately 50 hrs planning and executing it. The party was highly organised and great fun, with all the kids turning out in their costumes and Andrew sporting a very impressive Darth Vader outfit (the helmet had a voice box, it was beyond cool). Once I have access to the office PC I will put the images up on the web and edit this post (tomorrow, wednesday at the lastest) *edit* -- images now available here: 1 2 3 - apologies for how poor my camera is, I would buy a new one but I don't care enough. I took 14 picutes, but these are the only usable ones *edit*. My two big highlights of the party were tearing around the school with seven 10 year olds and trying to translate the clues for them, and seeing Andrew doing the same with his group incumbered by four 8 year olds that had found him and were hanging off his cape and arms because they wanted him to play with them (they were like the Imperial Guard, flanking behind him as he strode along the deck! dur dur dur, dur da dur, dur da dur!).
5. Getting drunk on shochu at the staff party on Friday and having a really good chat with one of my Japanese Teachers. She is really nice and I have really been enjoying teaching with her in the last two weeks - she is dependable, helpful and adaptable, everything a perfect co-teacher could be - but sometimes conversation can be a little hard going. Apparently shochu is the answer (mental note for christmas present: hip flask).

In other news, I have booked and paid for my flight home over christmas, so I will be spending two weeks back in the homeland over the holiday season. It's got it's good points and it's bad, but it will be exciting either way and I am looking forward to seeing England and my friends and family after 6 months away (it can't have been that long already!).

This week brings promises of peace and quiet - I only have about 8 classes all week, Thursday is a national holiday and my flat is warm enough to make laying under my douvet and watching Lost almost irresistable. Right now, I am heading out to meet a friend for dinner in Nagano city, so I will leave you with just one more Dune quote (I forgot what a great film it was till I hunted for the quote above)...

Don't try your powers on me, witch! Try looking into that place where you dare not look. You'll find me there, staring back at you!
- Paul "I'm actually quite scary" Atreides.

And so, once again, I am force to admit that something good actually did come out of the 80s.

"Autumn has ripened. / Its stillness reminds me of human feelings."

The total population of my school today, including me, is 5 people. A series of meetings for all local teachers has whisked away everyone with genuine teaching qualifications and left only the school admin staff and the academic imposters such as myself. Faced with this situation, I have done what any sensible person should do; I went exploring. My school is perfectly clean and completely empty; signs of life are around - a jumper here, a bag there - but no one can be seen or heard anywhere outside the school office. It made me feel like I was walking around a toy school, something designed to look real but only on the surface; the things that make a school what it is - the students - were no longer here, and so for me it stopped feeling like a school. And there is only one thing that a giant building will ever feel like when it doesn't feel as it is supposed to - a playground.
There is an incredible gangway outside on the second floor that runs the width of the school and allows you to look down into the garden at the center of the complex. Students stand out here and practice their instruments, but I have never had the chance to wander out there. Today I ventured out to take a look and found the sun light steaming down through the clouds on a surprisingly warm morning, fresh air carried by a soft breeze and the only sound I could hear was the singing of birds. Japan has such a beautiful landscape, and the area I am in is still rural enough that this may be the perfect place for enjoying peace and quiet.
Deciding that now was the perfect time to take photos of my school, I made a tour and have posted the best ones up on my gallery for your viewing pleasure. They are the 7 photos at the top of the page.

The extremes of weather in Japan, and in Nagano in particular, have meant that the swing between the seasons is manifested here in a matter of weeks, not months, and you can almost watch the weather changing from day to day. Last week saw the arrival of persistent cold weather for the first time since I landed and it heralded the end of summer. Nagano is bordered by the Japanese alps and it means that our winters are snowey and cold - reports of -15 centigrade last year have already reached my ears - and I have gone into emergency-winter-cloths-buying protocol already. Autumn here may only last 4 weeks, and when winter comes, it comes with heavy snow. If you look at the photos then you can see that right now it is still warm wind and clear sunshine, the last two days have been uncharacteristically warm given our move into autumn, but the first ski slopes open a little way from here on the 2nd November, only 3 weeks from now, and the first snow has already been reported on some of the higher slopes.
This is made even more interesting by living in an area which is still predominently agricultural - I came to school last week to find that the field overlooked by our school has been harvested and stripped before the winter, and driving around Nagano city 3 days ago I noticed the first purple leaves preparing to fall. These two photos, 1 and 2, show the field at the front of my school 6 weeks ago and today - it's amazing to see people's work dictated by the seasons, such obvious indications of the passage of time and nature. It's a very different feeling to the one you get back home of dissassociation from nature, or perhaps even opposition to it. Yesterday, the air smelt like Halloween and a gift store in town was playing music that sounded like Christmas tunes. Everything is different here; everything is interesting.

"There's nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child"

I have posted up a lot of the pictures I had on my camera from before the school festival, such as the Dai Ni Elementary School Festival and pictures from Tokyo - feel free to take a look. There are a load more pictures of Tokyo on Dennis's camera, but I haven't got around to taking them from him yet.

Kendo Update!

Kendo! Yeah! Wooh!

This week saw my 4th lesson and I am still really enjoying it - despite being the only gaijin there and my instructor not being able to speak a word of English, I picked up most of the things he was trying to communicate simply through watching him, and my progress seems to be good. This week we covered a little bit on the basic strikes and etiquete during sparring, and I got to train with a 7 year old girl. She is tiny, with a sword much taller than her, and wears a little bogu and has her hair in bunches. You have to say men when you strike, like a kiai, but when she does it she sounds like the little girl in Monsters Inc. At the end of most of the training sessions so far, she tries to hide from me and I chase her around the dojo. She is cute beyond words, but at present I have no photos to show you.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves until I return.

"It wears him out, it wears him out."

This week sees me teaching 21 classes over 5 days, including 5 classes straight today. Caffine is the ghost in my shell, working my fingers to type, telling my mind what to say. I am not here, I am asleep; caffine is talking to you through my body. In conclusion, todays blog entry will be sponsored by Nescafe and brought to you by the letter 'Tea'.

Last week was my school festival. It ran for two days, thursday and friday, and represented the culmination of 2 months work for my students. Whenever I asked anyone what sort of things would be at the festival, all I was told was "songs and dancing". For two days? I would ask. "Yes" would be the reply. That's an aweful lot of singing and dancing, I would say. Silence, they would reply.
The first day began the way that all big events in Japan start; with a massive amount of incredibly tedious speeches. The length of the speeches in Japan seems proporionate to the importance of the event, and from what I can gather, the actual quality of the contents doesn't really matter. Thus, as the biggest school event of the year, the speeches were extra long. They were broken up by some plays written and performed by the students that everyone enjoyed, and although I could hardly understand a word of it, I was kept busy enough wondering why there was atleast one cross dressing boy in every play. Most plays had a minimum of two boys wearing the female school uniform and running about the stage in confusion, while others opted to have all 30 actors cross dressing. It was like Shakespeare meets Sailor Moon.
I couldn't take any photos during the actual ceremony as it was too dark, but the gallery is here and you can see the main stage before everything begins here.
The afternoon was a sports day which had more emphasis on fun than any sports day I ever saw at home. Events included an obstacle course, a relay race, skipping, and a crazy giant ball game (the ball was the size of an elephant, I swear). Most of these can be checked out in the pictures.

The second day was even better than the first, and also much stranger. One lonely saturday about 3 weeks ago, before heading off to a festival at a local elementary school, I swung by my high school to pick up my bike. No one was around, and seeking mischief and adventure, I ninjaed in and started to wander about. Somewhere around the east side of the school, after pushing my way past the cannibals and outrunning the giant boulder, I found the music room. I could hear my students practicing within and attempted to sneak in to have a peak, but here my ninja skills failed me for as a gaijin, everyone instantly looks at me and points me out to their friends. Not only does this mean that my ninja powers only work when I am completely alone (it doesn't even work on cats anymore), which is almost completely useless, but now 35 students were all looking at me expectantly. I was feeling adventurous (this was an adventure, after all), so I played for a cheeky "Hello" and all tension was relieved. I watched them practice and was very impressed, but nothing could have prepared me for when they played on the morning of the second day of my school festival; most of my favourite students are in the school band, and it was an amazing experience to watch them get up infront of 400 people and try their hardest; when any child performed a solo, they walked to the front and stood on giant boxes 2 meters in the air as they hammered out the best they could and their friends cheered them on; most of the younger students took up pom-poms and cheerleaded for a couple of songs towards the end; and finally, they played the theme from Star Wars. I shed a tear, and also tried to challenge one of the Sociology teachers to a battle for the fate of the universe.
"Rook - watashi wa anata no otousan desu."
"IEEEEEEEE!!!"

The afternoon bought a traditional dance by my favourite third year class called Soran. The dance was performed in lines and the version of the song they used sounded upbeat and reasonably modern. They first performed on the stage, and then once the applause died down, they charged out into the audience and did it again within the crowd. I have watched them practicing the finale for the last 6 weeks, which involves everyone performing the last few moves while two students cartwheel across the stage and a third student is thrown into the air and performs and full back flip - it made an incredible finish, and it was a great experience watching some of the kids that I have really come to love performing something they have put so much time and effort into.
After that came the singing contest - every class had to perform a song infront of the school. The novelty of this wore off quite quickly, with there being 12 classes, plus a song from each year and the teachers and PTA performing one of their own, but it heralded the end and an opportunity to load myself up on coffee again. Once my blood/chemicals-of-satan ratios had returned to normal operation levels, I headed back into the hall and found the closing ceremony. This ceremony is the only thing that, since coming to Japan, I have been completely unable to understand. Before I came here, people told me of all the cultural differences between Japan and the UK and all of the things that I should watch out for, but in my experience so far the Japanese people are just like any other - they feel and laugh and get angry, the same as everyone else. The etiquette is a little different, but fundamentally the processes are the same - most things I have seen I can say "ah, that is like what we do at home, only much more polite and without stabbing/ swearing/ chavs/ burberry/ Elton John". It's a bit different, but their motivation as people still seems the same to me. That was until I saw the closing ceremony.

Everyone was given a candle and the chairs were cleared out of the hall. The students sat in lines that corresponded to their classes, and two students stood at the ends of each line. With the hall in almost total darkness, the only light came from two lit candles at the front of the hall. The third year in charge of compering the event shouted out from the stage and two spot lights fell on him from the back of the hall, and he began his speech. I couldn't understand much of it, but from the tone I could tell it was very sentimental. Looking back, I can't remember when they started playing the most depressing J-Rock song in the world on loop over the PA system, but for dramatic affect I remember it as being when the student on stage first started to choke up. He pushed through, but his speech wasn't getting any more light hearted and nothing was going to stop the emotions pushing their way up. Within a minute he was crying, trying to say the words he had written through the tears but he just couldn't get them out. In the crowd, a mumer started, and what I expected to be abuse came out as encouragement - "Gambatte!" - Try your best! No one came to his aid, no one got on stage to help him come down and let someone else take over, they just left him there.
{J-Rock hell finishes. And starts again.}
And, in time, he finished his speech. As if everyone wasn't upset enough, then the "thank you"s started - from the sides and the rafters, the stage and back, people shouted thank you to each class and a tiny speech - "Ni nen ni kumi, nani nani nani, arigatou gozaimashita!". "San nen ni kumi, nani nani nani, arigatou gozaimashit!". And as each class was thanked, so their candles were lit. By the time all the candles were alight, the girl infront of me was almost shaking with tears. A lot of the girls had started to get upset, and I had a horrible feeling that it was going to get worse.
{J-Rock hell finishes. And starts again.}
It started again, the "thank you"s shouted from the darkness, and with each thank you, a class blew out their candles. The hall was slowly being swallowed by the dark, starting at the front and moving towards the back. Girls faces were lit by the reflected light on the tears running down their cheeks, as they bent over and took a breath, before they disappeared. Eventually, with the exception of the students standing at the sides of the rows, all 400 students had blown out their candles and the hall was in darkness once more.
{J-Rock hell finishes. And starts again.}
The students that had previously been flanking the lines, the ones who had lit the candles and who had helped to put the whole festival together, moved to the door way and formed a tunnel through which each class would leave. One by one, they shouted the class name and then the same message of thanks, and one by one the students filed out of the hall. By now, anyone who wasn't crying had started and anyone who had been was destraught. The ones left holding the candles, forming the passageway, were a lot of my best students, and soon enough it was only me and them left. They formed a circle and gave one last speech, trying to hold it all together, and then - {J-Rock hell finishes. And starts again.}
Sobs exploded like long held secrets drunkely revealed and they held each other and told each other it would be OK. No one turned the music off, no one moved a muscle, they all just cried. 10 boys and 10 girls, all in tears. Then, somewhere, the lights were turned on and everyone could see each other how they would every other day, every other moment, when they weren't being raped by misery. They brushed then selves down and dried their eyes, and started to pack everything away. In an instant, they put away everything they had felt and got on with what they had to be doing. I tried to help, but I wasn't part of what they had shared and I was a harsh reminder of where they were now as opposed to where they had just been. I was forcing them into the real world faster than they wanted it or could take it, so I left and wandered the halls for a little while longer. Once again, as I have felt many times since I have begun living in Japan, I knew that I would always be an outsider here for as long as I stay, and although this has many many advantages, there are times when it can be very lonely.

That is the story of the end of my school festival.


Put the razors down, and read on a little further.

Unlike the Japanese, however, I do not want to leave things on a down note, so I have compiled a list of things that I love about my students. These things, individual moments of happiness, have become my reason for coming to school every day and it is one of the best feelings in the world.

1) When I first arrived at my second lesson with my special needs class, one of the students was checking out a web site for Godzilla VS Space Godzilla (in Japanese, "gojira VS supesu gojira!"). As you have heard me use so far a couple of times, the Japanese word gambatte mean "try your hardest", and is shouted as encouragement. It is a strong word and has rich social overtones here. Chan is also a word used to attach to girls names when you are addressing a child or someone younger and can help to make it kindof cute. This is why I laughed my ass of when, at the end of class, my student celebrated the end of the lesson by shouting "Gojira-chan, gambatte!" - Try your hardest, little (female) Godzilla.

2) One of my students asked me for the email address of my mobile. I gave it to him and then later that night recieved an email wishing me a good nights sleep and telling me that where he lives it was "a little chilly" - 15 year old boys love being thought of as cute, right?

3) Finally, the ninensei girl who is quickly becoming my favourite student. She can be seen in the photo here in the middle of the three. Everytime she sees me, she always waves and gives me the most enthusiastic "hello" I have ever heard. Every time. Her boundless energy and affection is incredible and exactly what you need after a bad class. Last week I had to teach the worst class I have for the final 20 mins of the lesson completely alone. Normally, our lessons consist of me and the teacher alternately sitting next to the two worst students and the other trying to teach. It was the worst lesson I have had so far and rounded off a perfectly terrible day. Then, when I left the lesson, the first person I saw was her. "Hello!". Everytime. And all was good once more.