My Life Story 2- Japan

Japanese rice fields and cosmos- the flower of the late summer/ autumn

After university, I went to Japan to teach English for a year. It wasn't a spontaneous decision; I had to apply in the autumn of my last year and anyway I'd been wanting to go for a while. I wanted to go abroad because I felt living in Britain and talking to British people was getting a bit predictable and boring, and because I went to visit my friend, who was doing French and German, on her year abroad (our third year) in both Avignon and Cologne and thought it looked like a wonderfull experience*. I wanted to go to Japan because I'd been studying Japanese- in the last two years of my degree it was possible to choose non-maths options for up to a quarter of the total studied (which worked out at two half-unit courses or one whole unit course a year), and this included courses run by the language centre, which were a popular choice. I'd been wanting to learn Japanese, attracted by its exoticness and its use of Chinese characters, and by Japanese culture in general, so signed up for a full unit course both years, which was theoretically supposed to take me from complete beginner to GCSE level in the first year and from there to A-level in the second year (though we didn't actually take GCSEs or A-levels, but exams set by the university)**

I went with the JET programme, which meant I was assisting the regular Japanese teachers of English in state schools rather than working in a private language school, and I was placed in a tiny village in Fukushima Prefecture (in the north of Japan's main island). I was shared between four very small secondary schools, spending two consecutive days per fortnight in each, and four elementary schools, also tiny, which I visited on Friday mornings, rotating between them. I say secondary schools; actually they were junior high schools with 3 forms each, catering for an age range of 12 to 15. As I mentioned in one of these footnotes, it was pretty remote, and living there had both good points and bad points. It was a year crammed full of experiences and stories, and I learned no end of stuff about the Japanese way of life which is all very interesting, but sadly not relevant here, since the point of all this (if I'd only keep to it) is to explain how I came to be where I am today, thus providing background to my future experiences at LSE which will be very relevant, and written up in according detail, though hopefully I'll have learned how to be concise by then and each post will be a terse and pithy gem of revealing and enlightening incident told in an entertaining way.*** However, some of my Japanese adventures may be related in future posts if they turn out to have anything to do with what I'm writing about.

I had a great time in Japan, but I didn't want to stay another year. This wasn't down to any negative feelings towards life in Japan- by the end of the year I was actually looking on leaving at 8.30 am and getting back home at 7.30 pm as perfectly normal for a shopping trip which consisted of 2 and 3/4 hours actual shopping time, with the rest on trains or waiting for the connection, (though admittedly I didn't feel quite the same way about it in January when I had to actually make the decision of whether to stay another year or not) and winter was sufficiently far in the past for me to feel once again that being trapped**** in a small village by waist high snowdrifts might be quite fun. It was for two reasons:

1. though Japan was great I was missing home; had the UK been within walking distance that would have been ideal (still would as now it's Japan I'm missing, though not as strongly). After I first arrived I would dream almost every night that I was back in London (I could tell it was London because there were red buses everywhere and I was always intending to go and buy something like English books or pasta sauce that I had to travel a long way for in Japan), and although the frequency was greatly reduced by the end of the year, the dreams never entirely went away.*****
2. apart from the homesickness I would have been ok living in my rural village in Japan another year but I didn't feel I could do the job for that long. I enjoyed visiting the elementary schools on Friday mornings but found the rest of the week rather a drag. I didn't have much preparation to do for lessons, so once that was finished, unless I could persuade the overworked Japanese teachers of English to let me do some marking for them, I had nothing to do. Which would be fine except I had to look like I was working, which is the most boring thing in the world, especially since I didn't have a computer at my desk so couldn't surrepticiously write emails or surf the internet. Also, even though I did like teaching at the elementary schools, I still didn't really feel teaching was for me and was sure that I would be better coming home and working out what I really wanted to go into.

So, after a very interesting and memorable year, I came back home, still without a career in mind. I knew back at school that I wasn't going to find it an easy decision; it was one of the reasons I applied for the four year rather than the three year degree, though that was also because I thought if I was interested enough in maths to do a whole degree in it I was interested enough to do an extra year. It was also a small reason for coming to Japan- even in the autumn of my final year, when I had to apply, I knew that by graduation I still wouldn't have a clue so might as well see a bit of the world while deciding. What I didn't expect was that by the end of my year in Japan I wouldn't know yet- with hindsight it was obvious, especially as I now realise that for most people a career choice doesn't just pop into the mind but needs a lot of research and work and so on which I hadn't done. That was all to come- and you can read about it in the thrilling next installment, which fortunately brings the reader up to date and is the last part of the background exposition- what a relief, eh?

*Of course I forgot to factor in two points-

1. my friend was living abroad as a student, and a student with very few compulsory courses at that, so was not short of leisure to wander round, read foreign books, and ride about on trams in, whereas I was going to work so only had evenings and weekends (and I was pretty tired in the evenings and slept late at weekends) and
2. my friend was living in cities or at least large towns so there were plenty of interesting shops to browse and great scope for meandering, including a very nice park in Cologne, not to mention Cologne being rapidly and cheaply connected to other interesting places such as Bonn and Dusseldorf, whereas I was in the Japanese countryside and saw everything within walking distance within about a week of arriving; the shops were pretty decent for such a small population but at the end of the day were nothing more exciting than little food shops; and I was too far from anywhere bigger to get there after work so that I was restricted to weekends for expeditions- and it really was an expedition as the nearest place of any size was an hour to an hour and a half by car or two hours by train, the nearest place for a lot of things I wanted to buy was another hour on the train, and the nearest place with English books needed an overnight stay which I couldn't afford very often.

So my experience of living abroad turned out to be as unlike my friend's as both were from living in the UK- but in spite of these bad points it was actually a good experience too:

• I got to talk to local people some of whom, though generally reserved, saw a blue eyed brown haired foreigner as something so unusual that they had to find out why I was there (the less talkative ones probably just wondered) and I had a lot of interesting conversations in train stations and local shops
• I got to take part in a lot of traditional culture- particularly dance, as I was able to take a weekly dance lesson with women from the village, the youngest of whom was probably about 50 and the oldest in her 70s, besides performing in and watching some of the dance show the village put on for Culture Day, I learned how to make sasamaki (a kind of Japanese pudding consisting of rice boiled in sasa leaves and served with sugar and ground beans, a lot nicer than it sounds) with primary school children from the area, and on another occasion dango, rice flour dumplings, and I learned how to make an origami shuriken or ninja throwing star, though sadly I've forgotten again
• Being in an agricultural region, the schools I taught at mostly had a couple of fields and a vegetable garden of their own for teaching students, and at two of them I got to spend half a day harvesting soba (buckwheat) in the school fields with the pupils and teachers- up to then buckwheat was something I enjoyed eating but had never seen apart from as flour and had no idea what it looked like so it was amazing to be in a field of it chopping through the tough stalks with a kind of Japanese sickle. At one of the schools I got to stay behind with one of the teachers after everyone else had gone and pull up some of the Japanese radishes (daikon) that had grown as weeds underneath the soba which was great too. Then at that same school a month or so later I got to join in with the second years when they went to a local woman's house for a class in making the soba, now ground into flour, into the traditional soba noodles, which is something else I would hate to have missed, even if when I tried to make them again recently from memory the result was a near total disaster
• I experienced the daily life of a Japanese village just by being there: the metre high snow in the winter, the paraffin powered heaters that had to be refilled every day, the lack of air conditioning in the summer, the temperamental bath^^ which was probably of a type quite common to the area, the traditional rooms with tatami mat flooring and kotatsu (literally 'small table', a sort of square coffee-table height piece of furniature designed to be sat round on floor cushions, and with a built in electric heater on the underside so that in winter, with your feet tucked under a large blanket put between the table top and frame and spreading down to the floor on all sides to keep the heat in, you can quickly warm up), the friendly bus drivers on the 3-times-a-day-each-way buses, in fact the friendly people in general, the little food shops with seasonal fruit and vegetables, the tiny schools (one of the secondary schools had only one first year student though most of the schools had 10 to 20 students per year), the local mountain vegetables^^^, and the incredible scenery

The soba noodles

**This might have been true in terms of grammar but in two years of study I didn't really pick up an incredibly extensive vocabulary- something I didn't fully realise untill arriving in my little village and meeting my supervisor, who spoke no English (or at any rate too little to want to try using it) and plainly didn't think much of my Japanese. I'd heard, at the pre-departure orientation amongst other places, that the Japanese tend to be very surprised if you try to speak their language, and even if you only manage to come out with 'How do you do? My name is _________' will shower you with compliments, both because they consider the language too difficult for foreigners to master and because it is the Japanese way to be lavish with praise even if the person in question is not showing great skill since they consider politeness and friendliness so important. So, even though I knew my predecessor had got pretty good at Japanese (having stayed there for 3 years and studied it before that), I thought that with my Japanese well past the 'Pleased to meet you' stage, I'd be spending my first few weeks blushing and saying 'Oh no, really, thankyou, but I'm not that good!'^^^^ to everyone I met, and I was quite surprised that my supervisor was clearly disappointed in my language ability. (After my predecessor it must have been rather a shock to have to deal with someone who answered everything she said with 'I don't understand') It was at this point that I realised my vocabulary was small to the point of seriously handicapping me; something that particularly drove it home was that on my first day I was baffled by a word of my supervisor's: 'Daijoubu desu ka?' she kept on asking me: 'Is it/ Are you daijoubu?' 'What is this daijoubu,' I wondered; ' it seems important?'. The Japanese teacher of English, also present, explained that it meant 'ok'- somehow I'd managed to avoid learning that in my two years' study. From assessed projects, I knew the Japanese for 'woodblock print', 'carve', 'imitate' and 'indigenous' among others, but not 'ok', 'potato', or 'onion', for example. They just hadn't come up. This was not a state of affairs that persisted however; living in a small village almost entirely populated by non- or poor English speakers and shopping in stores where all the vegetables were labelled in Japanese did what two years of classes back in the UK hadn't been able to. By the end of my stay I had a vastly inflated vocabulary and stock answers to a variety of (annoyingly) frequently asked questions and comments such as 'Is it cold in the UK?', 'Does it snow there?', 'Why did you come to Japan?', 'Wow! You can use chopsticks!', and 'Did you know that in X village [where I was staying] there's over a metre of snow in the winter?'^^^^^ And I did in fact need that phrase, not just early on, when people less used to my predecessor or just more gracious were prepared to complement my attempts even though mostly what I was saying was 'I'm sorry, I don't understand', but towards the end I even had to pull it out for my supervisor, which I took as real praise even though the sentence did begin something along the lines of 'When you first got here you hardly spoke a word of Japanese, did you, but now'- after all the flipside to not being complimented automatically at the beginning is knowing that if a compliment does finally arrive it's truly meant.

***I realise a little fewer footnotes would help on the road to conciseness (though on the other hand you do not want to see the original version where all this stuff was long digressions in the main text, rendering it pretty well unreadable). This was never intended to be a footnote-heavy blog, or indeed to contain any footnotes at all, it just somehow turned out this way. I'm hoping that I'll be able to largely do without them when I get onto the diary proper... but I'm not sure what I can do about the rest- hopefully time constraints and self discipline will help, but the truth is that brevity has never been one of my virtues. Still, I mean to try.

****Well ok, most of the time the trains carried on running, but there were a few days after more snow had fallen when the service was suspended while they cleared the new lot off the lines, and for several weeks when a massive snowdrift blocked the line they had to run a rail replacement bus for the first half hour of the journey- and the snow stopped me, if not the hardier Japanese, from driving: on the first day of snow, even though I was going slowly and being very very gentle with the brake, using the gears instead, I skidded twice, one time spinning right through 360 degrees and ending up in the other lane; I was perfectly willing to believe that with practice I too could become accomplished at not sliding out of control, but on the other hand I had a strong feeling that roads with one side a sheer rockface and the other a great drop were not where I wanted to learn, and requested permission to use the train and bus to get to the various schools over the winter (permission was required as the train and bus schedules meant I'd be 10 minutes late at one school and 1/2 an hour at one of the others; I never had lessons first thing but being present is very important for the Japanese). Actually I preferred the bus and train even though the bus left at 7.30 am and got back at 7.30 pm and I had to hang around at the schools pretending to work while I waited for it (see above); I've always liked public transport and hated driving, since on the former you can have a nap, look out of the windows, read a book and generally relax, and if there's some delay there's nothing you can do about it so no point in getting stressed (actually Japanese public transport is very good and even on days when snow was falling there usually wasn't any hold up, or not much) whereas in a car you have to concentrate and if you get stuck behind a tractor you end up blaming yourself for not leaving earlier.

The end of my line- I only went there once

*****I choose to consider it quite a feat that, having decided to go abroad because I was bored of Britain^^^^^^, I managed to start feeling homesick from about Day 3 and keep it up till the end of the year.

^Ok, I'm used to no air conditioning from living in the UK, but in my little village I got to experience no air conditioning in a very hot country where for two or three months of the year you're constantly sticking not only to your seat but even to yourself, which was new5, and for my last day or so, when I had to move into the flat next door so my successor could move into mine, I even got to experience no electric fan in too-hot-to-move conditions which was very new, as my flat had had a fan which was very nearly enough to deal with the Japanese summer, although not if you had to go into another room for any reason.

^^Which, in addition to being Japanese style, ie deep and square so you sit rather than lie in it, and you are supposed to wash before getting in, was an old fashioned model which had to be filled to a depth of 20 or 30cm (which took 5 or 10 minutes) before you could light the boiler, which was done by turning a knob with one hand and cranking a lever with another; it would then, hopefully but not always, catch with a whooomph, and then and only then could you get hot water out of the shower; the bath could then be filled with (very) hot water, whilst the cold that was already in there would be sucked into the boiler to be heated (to a very high temperature). This meant that the natural options of lighting it then going away and leaving it to finish filling, or filling it right up before lighting the boiler then waiting for the water to get heated were complicated by the fact that if you forgot about it (as I usually did) and didn't come back in time you'd have a bath of a temperature more appropriate for boiling lobsters than washing in, and would have to scoop out some water (it being too hot to put your arm in and reach for the plug) then add cold- this way it was just about possible to achieve water such that, if you inserted a foot, the pain would be just about bearable, and you could very gradually sit down- if you then remained still it would be quite pleasant until you started to feel dizzy. When I moved in April, the new house (which was very modern) had a shower that would emit warm water with no lighting of boilers or filling of baths, and the bath itself could be set to the desired temperature (ranging from the same lobster boiling temperature as the other bath to merely pretty hot for a Westerner; my friendly neighbour recommended as perfect a temperature that was about 10 degrees above what turned out to be, after some experimentation, the hottest I could bear, and coincidentally pretty much the coldest option. What was interesting about this was that she recommended the temperature because people would often set it hotter but she thought it was ideally cool), and I pretty much fell in love with it, and have missed Japanese baths since coming home. But the first bath was really what might be called an interesting rather than a likeable experience

^^^Actually I would have passed on this one if I could, there was a rather slimy one called warabi that I had to eat out of politeness on various occasions and it was like fresh cooked asparagus in raw egg white

^^^^Somehow I hadn't got as far as realizing that I'd never learnt the right phrase for that; I was quite surprised when, a week or so into my stay, at the special post-arrival language course, the teacher taught all of us in the top class the phrase she was confident we'd be needing to have constantly at the ready: 'Iie, made-made desu', and I thought 'Hang on, I didn't actually know that, did I?'

^^^^^Last question became 'Were you surprised by how much snow there is/was in X village?' from the winter onwards. Answers: 'In the summer it's cooler than Japan but in the winter it's warmer', 'Yes, but it only snows around three times a year, just a few centimetres falls usually and it only stays a few days', 'I learned Japanese because I liked Japanese culture and I wanted to come to Japan because I was learning Japanese', 'Yes, in the UK we use chopsticks in Chinese and Japanese restaurants' and 'Really?!'/ 'Yes, I was very surprised!'55 (from winter on) respectively

^^^^^^Actually Britain ceased to bore me as soon as I started to get homesick; I suddenly realised there are worse conversational problems than everyone you talk to having one of two views on every issue, and they include not understanding the other person, not being able to make them understand you, and finding out when understanding is finally achieved, that no-one seems to be prepared to offer any views on issues at all (the Japanese like to avoid controversy and arguments). Once back here, I was filled with an amazing love and appetite for all things British which still hasn't entirely left me, though I'm now missing Japanese things too.

5Don't get me wrong, I'm actually all for doing without air conditioning wherever possible for environmental reasons, and certainly don't think we need it here, even when we have a heatwave. It's just that when I've visited other hot places (including Tokyo when I first arrived before we were all sent to our placement areas) there hasn't been a shop/ hotel/ whatever without it, so it was a new experience. However, I have to say that in spite of wanting to save energy, even in this country I don't think I could do without an electric fan in very hot weather. I'm hoping they're a lot better for the environment than air conditioning but have to admit to not having actually got round to checking yet.

55True answer: 'Amazingly, no. I'm not quite sure why that should be- could it possibly have something to do with the way that everybody I've met since August has found somewhere in our first conversation to tell me that there is over a metre of snow in X village in the winter? No, surely not. A mystery, then'

The surprising snow

--------------------------------------