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Section 93 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 February 16 Monday.
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The Japanese nation continues to be very interested in Japan's military deployment to Iraq, and, here in Japan, the top news story on the 0700 news on NHK 1 this morning was from the Iraqi city of Samawah, in the south of Iraq.
There, apparently, the troops from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force are facing sandstorms. Apart from that, so far so good.
Section 93 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 February 17 Tuesday.
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Home alone, so I cooked New Zealand lamb. This successfully makes its way across the oceans to my local supermarket here in Japan ... but the particular package of lamb chops that I bought had been marked down because it had reached its sell-by date and nobody had bought it.
The supermarket must succeed in selling some lamb otherwise it would not routinely have (small) quantities of lamb on offer. However, although the New Zealand meat industry has succeeded in delivering a high-quality product to the Japanese market, there remains a marketing problem which is pretty much insurmountable: the average Japanese consumer quite simply does not like lamb.
Today I woke up at 0500 (not my plan, but that's what happened.) My teaching schedule varies quite a bit, but today I didn't have to leave home until 1100, so I decided to cook a proper breakfast. I ended up cooking what is (by my present standards) a pretty simple meal: potatoes and sweet potatoes (in Japanese, "satsumaimo" - in New Zealand parlance, "kumera"), white rice, sweetcorn, lamb chops and pork.
Half the potatoes, kumera, rice and sweetcorn went into a lunch box, together with the pork. The rest of the food went onto my plate and made breakfast.
My lifestyle has changed considerably in the six years or so since I came to Japan, and one of the major changes is that my notions of "cooking" have gotten a lot more elaborate. When I was living in New Zealand, "cooking" might mean getting a piece of steak, frying it for ten minutes, then serving it up with a single thick slab of bread and butter.
Now, even when I'm home alone, I don't usually go in for that kind of barbaric simplicity ... and one of my more elaborate meals might include, for example, meat, potatoes, kumera, white rice, carrots, broccoli, mushrooms (conventional mushrooms or one of the weird fungal growths sold in the supermarket) and a salad (containing, for example, lettuce, mung beans, the shoots of soy beans and tomato.)
It would be difficult to cook properly if I was living in the cramped accomodation that many English teachers in Japan have to put up with. It's not uncommon to have a whole bunch of people living in rooms in a "gaijin house," a house with rooms which a landlord rents out to foreigners, with the foreigners in question typically sharing one or two toilets and a single kitchen.
However, I'm living in a proper house with its own small kitchen with a microwave oven (a gadget which can not only microwave stuff but which can also be used to bake things, for example baked potatoes), a toaster, a three-ring gas range, pots and pans and a steamer (which is my instrument of choice for cooking vegetables) and a rice cooker.
We have also recently bought a pressure cooker, which can be used to cook brown rice. This is considerably healthier than white rice, but takes quite some time to cook, even in the pressure cooker. I haven't yet figured out for myself how to use the pressure cooker but I hope to make mastering this device my next step on my journey into the no longer entirely unfamiliar world of healthy cooked food.
Section 93 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 February 18 Wednesday.
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Team teaching at elementary school is good because you can learn new activities from the other teachers, educational things you can do in the gym with sixty kids.
If you're team teaching with teachers from other countries, you can also learn things about their cultures. Yesterday I was team teaching with two Canadians, and, on the way from the train station to the school, I learnt the definition of "field party."
A "field party" is, apparently, in Canada (or, at least, in Ontario) a party that you hold in a field. You (a bunch of people too young to legally drink) go to a field (typically a cornfield, it seems) with beer. And sit down. And drink. And that's your party.
When I was growing up in rural New Zealand, I sometimes thought that the rest of the world must be more sophisticated than my immediate surroundings, but it seems that's not necessarily the case. Back in New Zealand, we certainly didn't stoop to having parties in cornfields. (We didn't have any cornfields. It was cow country.)
If the walk had been longer, I could doubtlessly have learnt other fascinating things about Canada's rich and nuanced culture, but unfortunately we ran out of road. While team teaching at the school, however, I learnt two good games, one called "Touch something yellow" and one called "Numbers."
The "Touch something yellow" game is very, very simple. The teacher calls out a color and the kids run and touch something that color (typically something another kid is wearing.) I played with the game a bit and tried combinations, such as "touch something black and white," which also worked well.
(This being elementary school, the kids were wearing clothes of various colors. At a junior high school, where everyone is usually dressed in uniform, it wouldn't have worked so well.)
The other game, "Numbers," was also simple. The teacher calls out a number, such as "four," and the students have to make a group of four people. Those who can't bind themselves into such a group are out.
Since I'd learnt two new (workable) games in a single day, I ended up feeling very pleased with the way things had turned out.
The downside came on the way back to the station, when the Canadians started talking with each other about ice hockey. I've seen "ice hockey" on TV. It is (I think, though I'm not setting myself up as an expert) a kind of ritualized fighting on ice. And (somehow) it has become an Olympic sport. (Well, if beach volleyball can become an Olympic sport, what can't?)
I'm not a great sports fan, and, when it comes to ice hockey, I just don't get it. What's the appeal? I couldn't connect with the Canadians' ice hockey conversation, not at all, and I experienced the meaning of cultural alienation.
That, then, was the elementary school portion of my day.
Teaching at elementary school is very good for my Japanese, because, even if the instruction is carried out pretty much entirely in English (which it was in this case) there tend to be long conversations in Japanese with the teachers both before and after the teaching session.
At the moment I'm heavily into one of my "let's get serious about studying Japanese" pushes, so I welcome the chance to chat. At home, I've been getting into the lazy habit of listening to CNN in English, but, a couple of days ago, I played with the controls and set the sound so what I hear is the Japanese translation rather than the English original.
(What I'm watching, on cable TV, is something called, I think, CNN-J, a "for Japan" version of CNN. I don't know the details of how the translations are done, but my guess is that they have live translators doing simultaneous translations from English to Japanese ... I don't think it's canned. I've found myself wondering about the translators and what kind of hours they work and how they handle the pressure.)
And, yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I bought a Japanese language copy of the Asahi Shimbun ... I can understand between five percent and ninety percent of this, depending on what the subject material is. I generally do better with ads than with articles - the articles tend to be jam-packed with kanji that I can't recognize, but the ads generally go in for easier Japanese.
When I'm trying to read a Japanese-language newspaper, then, my experience is an odd mix of "this isn't too hard" and "I just don't get this at all." On average I'm able to grasp (at a guess) about twenty percent of what I'm looking at ... it's going to be a long haul to literacy.
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