Under the Rock

I learned that I got this job in Japan in July or August, but had to wait until September to get my actual school placement. Supposedly, the company tries to match instructors with schools based on…well I’m not quite sure what information they draw from. I’m left with a few possibilities: someone switched my resume for a lookalike, Westgate (my employer) uses ‘interpretive’ methods, or they drew names out of a hat, because I was placed at Nihon University of Bioresource Sciences.

In defense of N.U.B.S.: its name forms the best acronym ever, the campus is really very pretty, and the four of us EFL teachers have a large teachers lounge to ourselves, as well as our own classrooms. And my fellow Nubsters are the best; if nothing else Westgate did seem to know to put the four most random and goofy and not-serious people at the same school.

The issue at hand: well, NUBS is a science school. My students major in things like forestry, food science, marine science, umm…animal science(?), and other science-y stuff. My scientific life peaked my senior year of high school, when I took A.P. Chemistry. I did not take two years of chemistry out of my great love for the periodic table and the joys of titration; I took it to get out of studying science (or much of it) in college. This plan backfired in the end, anyway, when damn UW wouldn’t accept the credit. I ended up taking classes like Biology 100. My teacher had a rat tail and our labs consisted, memorably, of drawing lines on paper with ballpoint pens and seeing if termites followed them. We were supposed to learn about pheromones. I learned that it sucked that it counted for nothing that I MADE ASPIRIN in my chemistry lab in high school.

Don’t get me wrong, I think science is great and that it’s excellent that people like to study it. It’s just like, similar to many pursuits that I think I should like but I’m really not that into, it just doesn’t take with me. Like how I’ll decide that I should garden, it’s a nice hobby and my friends do it, and then I buy one plant and I kill it within a week. Or I think I should learn a musical instrument. This lasts about long enough for me to look at sheet music, realize how much work it would take to actually figure out how to read it and play it, and then go back to reading my magazine. Once a year or so I take a stab at liking olives; being of half-Italian descent and having lived in Spain, I figure it’s a travesty that I don’t, so I give it another go in hopes that my taste buds have matured. I’m still not a fan.

Basically I’m content to say that trees and flowers and lakes and mountains and animals (the cute ones anyway) are pretty and nice and should be protected, respected, etc. I just let the Authentic Scientific People work out the details.

Why is this problematic, you may be asking? Well, in many ways it’s not. I find it endearing that my students enjoy going to the zoo on the weekend, and a telescope for bird-watching is first on their packing list to go camping, and that the person they most admire is the guy that knows SO MUCH about fish. Other times, I am simply impressed when they tell me about their labs in which they split DNA. Read DNA? Replicate DNA? I don’t know what people do with DNA in labs, actually, just the word itself is enough for me to consider them near-geniuses. Meanwhile, when not furiously working on my lesson plans, I am in the NUBS lounge reading David Sedaris, or checking my e-mail downstairs, or talking with my co-workers about…well I won’t tell you what about, it’s almost never appropriate. But I can tell you it’s not the life cycle of the 6-toed platypus.

It’s just that…well sometimes I just can’t think of what to SAY to them. Especially in a really small class, like me and one or two students. Examples:
Me: What did you do last weekend?
Student: I did club activity. We went to the mountains for animal tracking.
Me: Oh…cool! Did you see any animals?
Student: No, only tracks.
Me: Okay. What did you do after that?
Student: I went home and studied.
Me: Ummm…sounds fun? Did you learn a lot?
Student: Yes.
Cue awkward silence.
Or:
Me: What was the happiest moment of your life?
Student: When I went to Malaysia and saw very rare bird. It is so beautiful.
Me: What was the proudest moment of your life?
Students: When I waited for three days in the forest and saw bird family.
Me: What is your most valuable possession?
Student: My telescope. I use it for watching birds.
Me: If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you like to be?
Student: In Thailand. There are many birds there I haven’t seen yet.
Me: Ummm…did you ever have a dream about flying like a bird?
Student: No.
Cue awkward silence.
Or:
Me: What did you use to like to do on the weekends?
Student: I used to go the the lake and catch insects.
Me: That sounds fun. What do you like to do now?
Student: I like to go to the lake and catch insects.
Me: Ummm…what kind of insects??
Student: Grasshoppers.
Cue awkward silence.

I like to think that I am good at “keeping the conversation going,” (one of the Westgate tenets), but sometimes I’m truly at a loss. It’s not my poor students’ fault. They deserve one of those intrepid, outdoorsy, science-y EFL teachers (I know there’s some floating around), who can understand their knowledge and passion for four-legged and two-winged and ten-eyed creatures instead of one like me, who cannot appreciate the subtle differences between grasshoppers and locusts. And who asks daft questions like “What is your favorite thing about monkeys?”.

Meanwhile, the activities that I think will be so interesting and fun for my 19-22 year old college students fall flat. For first conditional: ‘If you can date any celebrity in the world, who will you go out with?’ (‘I’m not interested in celebrities’). For present perfect: ‘Have you ever stayed at a club until it closed?’ (‘I have never been to a club’). For superlatives: “What is the craziest thing you ever did at school??!” (‘Once I fell asleep in class. I was very tired because I was up all night studying’).

Unquestionably the world needs more people like my students and less like me, I mean my top two talents are probably spacing out and procrastinating. You should see me avoid doing something I don’t want to do, seriously. While my students are like, creating a new breed of fish that can breathe on land, or something. But, I’ll keep bumbling along and maybe I’ll even learn some stuff about science. (But I doubt it!).

Big In Japan

One day during English Challenge -- it’s kind of an informal conversation period; any student can come – students had to make two statements about a foreign country. About the United States, one student said people are friendly, and everything is big.

America is, indeed, the land of super-sizing, of SUVs, 5-lane freeways, 4-bedroom-2-bath homes, 32 oz. drinks…bigger, is, pretty much, always better, and we (and our possessions) seem to expand to fill the spare room or the new lane or the wider seat.

Through the looking glass, however, by way of my hefty American eyes, Japan is a country in miniature, a doll-sized version of life. This is the country that invented all things “cute.” Apartments are small (I never imagined a refrigerator, microwave, sink, stove, and washing machine could fit in 10 square feet of space), food is small (you know how they invented those ‘serving size’ half-pints of ice cream…here they’re half the size of the half-size!), people are small (I tower over half my male students, and I still don’t know how my co-worker who’s 6’3” doesn’t hit his head on everything), shoes are small (an XL shoe here is an American eight…ouch!). I went shoe-shopping with my friend Eilidh; her feet are slightly smaller than mine, and when we asked for her size the salespeople looked at us like we were trying to find the Yeti. I think they really didn’t believe that such a massive size existed; then they looked down at our size 9.5 and 10 feet in horror.

On the one hand, we Americans could take a lesson from the Japanese. There is very little excess here…you’ll rarely see massive portions of food, or sprawling mansions, or huge trucks. To be fair, this is one of the most densely populated nations on earth, and big things quite simply wouldn’t fit. It doesn’t seem to be ingrained in the mentality of people here, however, that more is better…there is an acute awareness of the presentation of things, and often expansion doesn’t come along with good aesthetics.

I very rarely see really overweight people here. Considering that most industrialized nations are dealing with an increasingly heavier population (as our lives get more convenient, we put on the pounds we once kept off with physical labor), I find it remarkable that this isn’t much of an issue in Japan. It truly doesn’t seem like people always want more…they generally have or take what they need. Also, people always sit down to eat or even to drink; it’s a big faux pas to walk around eating or drinking something. The other possibility is that they’re too busy working to eat – it’s common to work 12+ hour days here, in any employment sector.

I must admit that I do miss some big things. I miss other big people so I don’t feel so much like Gulliver in Lilliput, I miss economy size packs of things (I’ve tragically finished the 3 lb. container of coffee I brought with me from Costco, and now must buy my coffee 6 ounces at a time – the largest container -- from the local market), I miss having a sofa to sit on (no room in my apartment!), I miss shoes that fit (I can’t lie, though, it’s probably better off I’m unable to buy shoes because I for sure don’t need more!), I miss space in general – Japan can be quite a claustrophobic country, it’s pretty much crowded everywhere. Also, although I do admire the Japanese’ penchant for portion control, I do find that the amount of packaging used is quite wasteful – with the exception of rice, that you can buy in 10 lb. packs.

If nothing else, I think it’ll be a little shocking to go home to the Land of Big Gulps after being in the Country of 6 oz. Water Glasses. I can’t lie, though…I’m looking forward to good old American coffee and BIG boxes of cereal. Oh, and other Big People so that I feel normal-sized again.