Section 80 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 December 2 Sunday.
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Sunday. And, as often happens on Sunday, I caught part of a conceptually interesting TV program which, on Sundays, has been screening on NHK1 here in Japan from 0825 to 0855. This program involves some middle-aged person returning to his or her elementary school to teach elements of his or her profession to sixth grade kids (kids aged 11 or 12).

The program is called:-

which I translate as "Extracurricular Instruction."

In the past, there have been episodes in which alumni taught the kids elements of drama, writing, painting and synchronized swimming. In today's episode, an expert in teaching seeing eye dogs got the kids to try their hands at his particular art.

There were two point about today's program that I found particularly interesting. The first is that Japanese guide dogs are taught to respond to the English words "Sit!" "Down!" and "Good." The second was that when a kid played a retrieve-the-ball-I-throw game with a dog, the kid wore white gloves for the task.

As I've remarked elsewhere, manual work in Japan is frequently done while wearing white gloves, and there are a pair of white gloves included with the emergency rations kit that I received at the end of the local earthquake training session.

However, even so, it would never have occurred to me that someone would put on gloves for playing with a dog.

I've checked the TV guide for this month, and it seems that in this area (Tokyo/Yokohama) fresh episodes of Kagaijugyō will be screening on December 14th and December 21st (but not on the 28th, by which time special end-of-year TV programming will have kicked in.)