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Uncategorized

Questions Kids Ask

Question from a 4th grader at lunch:

Sean-sensei?
Yes?
Um, in the place that you were born, like, how many of the people there have iPhones?
About half.
Oh, ok.  Thanks.

Question from a junior high student:

Excuse me, may I ask you a question?
Sure.
How many Japanese words do you know?
Ummm, five thousand.
Ok, thank you.

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Uncategorized

Reencountering English

It’s common to hear Anglophone expats joke about how their English has gotten worse while living in Japan. It seems a rather silly notion, and certainly based on the criterion of simple grammatical accuracy, their native English proficiency likely remains unchanged. However, research has shown that the acquisition of a second language can affect one’s first language in a few ways. Our grammaticality judgements of ambiguous first language sentences can be influenced by our acquisition of second language grammar. For example, if I encountered the sentence “Joe drank the medicine,” I might have less of a problem with it than an English speaker, since in Japanese you use the verb for “drink” with all types of medicine – both solid and liquid. A monolingual English speaker might either want the sentence to be clarified by more detail, or by the use of the more generally applicable verb “take.” It is likely that the sentence will be more acceptable to a native English speaker with Japanese as a second language.

Personally, I find myself topicalizing sentences a lot more in English than seems normal, probably because Japanese is a language that frequently topicalizes the “main idea” of a sentence. For example, I might say “The bank over there, I went there yesterday” instead of the more natural “I went to that bank yesterday.” And considering that sometimes I cannot recall utterly ordinary words, or find myself saying incredibly odd things to friends and family.

Well, it seems that it goes in the other direction, too. On a trip back to the US this spring, I found myself constantly enraptured and drawn in by the ordinary conversations surrounding me. I could understand everything people were saying, but what they were saying and how they were saying it seemed new and shiny to me, like you feel when you’re in a completely foreign place. The juxtaposed feelings of being once again “home” in your native language, and being shocked by the newness of that language conspired to create a surreal kind of anomie.

It was so strange, in fact, that I took notes on what I was hearing. I wrote them down verbatim. I still think they are fascinating:

TSA ID checker guy

“Well that used to be a winery. And there was a grove of apricot trees before that.”

Frizzy hair girl on jetway boarding plane:

“…And I’m so terrified of people watching me in the freezer.”

Delta flight attendant:

“Would you care for a choice of peanuts pretzels or cookies?”

Guy on his cellphone in downtown Boston:

“Yeah I just wanna travel I wanna do some shit.”

Lady on her cellphone in downtown Boston:

“Yeah you know Sally has wanted to meet up. And she saw the thing. You know who she is. I think uh, I think she’s like a million miles a minute.”

Guy on the Boston T, mumbling into a headphone mic:

“What do you think? Do we have a solution to this or do we have to do some deeper thought?”

Little girl In Brooklyn:

“My BMX, my decision!”

Older man on the street in NY, talking to a woman in front of a supermarket:

“This stuff won’t kill you; What’s in there will fuck you.”

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Uncategorized

Thank Your Teachers

A few weeks ago an ALT friend posted on Facebook asking for advice on how to deal with uncooperative homeroom teachers who do not actually team teach with him. We have all known these teachers. Some of them grade papers while the ALT tries to run the class, some stand or sit in the back of the classroom, starting confusedly at a copy of the lesson plan that they are supposed to be teaching.

If you’ve ever been an Assistant Language Teacher in Japan, then you know vast the difference is between a helpful, cooperative teacher, and the deadbeats. My friend’s post struck me though, because he is what you might call a professional ALT. He has roots in Japan, he takes his job seriously, and he has a lot of experience in international English education. But even with these resources to bear, he still faces the same problem which plagued me as a first year ALT. Of course, it is not his fault, but it made me realize how hard it is to instill positive teaching practices in teachers who have little experience with English or who simply allow themselves to succumb to the fears of difference.

It also made me realize how lucky I am to have teachers with whom I have developed healthy and positive teaching relationships. Of the 30 or so Japanese teachers that I work with, none of them cower in the rear of the class, none of them are so rude as to grade papers, and although the level of interaction and classroom control varies, across five schools, I am lucky to have no issues even approaching this level.

So after all three of my elementary classes this morning, I thanked each teacher personally as we walked back to the classroom. I realized that in acclimating to Japanese culture, in which uniformity and equity are social norms, I have forgotten how to really show true appreciation. These teachers deserve to have some cookies baked for them, for being professionally and socially proficient enough to work with a person who is an intuitive expert in the subject material, but also perform the role of primary teacher. It really can’t be easy. So thank your JTE’s the next time you have a great class. Maybe other teachers will catch on and learn.

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Uncategorized

Welcome to America

The experience that one has when encountering a faceless organ of the state really depends on the manner and tone of the actual human face you interact with. I return to the US about once or twice a year, and have had a wide range of experiences. Sometimes the border control agents are very friendly, chatting about their day, or mentioning their own Japanese experiences when I mention where I live. Other times they simply follow their script. Usually the script seems pretty boring, almost basic to the point of inanity.

When I flew back into the US this May, I had a rather odd interaction with the border control agent in Los Angeles. Here’s the content of our entire exchange. I’m confident that it is word for word, since I wrote it down immediately afterward:

Why were you in Japan?

I live there.

What do you do in Japan?

I teach English.

When is your birthday?

June 6th, 1984

Have you ever lived in New Haven, CT?

No.

Welcome to America.

Have you ever lived in New Haven, Connecticut? My initial reaction was that the guy thought I looked familiar and wanted to make sure he knew me or not. But would he insert such a personal question into an official transaction of information? And if it was a legitimate question, what is the connection? I’m still amused by the seeming pointlessness of the exchange. I gave all of the right answers, but I have some new doubts about the relevance of the questions asked at our borders.

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Japan

Is Perception of Light Culturally Conditioned?

Do Japanese and North Americans have fundamentally different attitudes and preferences toward the relative brightness and color of light in their homes and offices? Are there specific sources that this attitude can be traced back to, and are they in turn related to other fundamental cultural differences?

I ask this question because evidence that this may indeed be a general cultural truth keeps coming up in my conversations and daily life. In my experience here in Japan, the lighting in nearly every Japanese house that I have entered has been entirely comprised of overhead, white, fluorescent lights. Bedrooms have these lights as well. Very rarely have I seen households in which the majority of the light inside comes from lamps, indirect or diffuse sources of light, or has a warm yellow or golden color. Those that have are typically inhabited by people who have been specifically influenced by their stays in American homes.

These kinds of lights, which are so common here, are those that I would characterize as harsh, unhappy lights. These are lights for working, lights for a purpose. These are functional lights that irradiate every corner of a room and have only two settings – pitch black or blinding white. For me, this kind of light is not appropriate for one’s home. A home is not simply a utilitarian shelter, but a place for one’s mind and soul to seek solace from the outside world. When one is at home, they should feel at home. Warm, indirect light reminds us that we are in a place of comfort, perhaps evoking a womblike quality in which we are able to retreat just enough from the glare of reality to face it again the next day. The glare of a fluorescent is psychologically jarring. So, I fail to understand why it is so common in the homes of the Japanese, a people and a culture who are no strangers to luxury and amenity.

This conflict between these two kinds of light has actually been one of the greatest sources of argument fodder in my own marriage. On summer evenings, I’ll come home first, and switch on a ring of holiday lights that perimeter the ceiling and the small light over the range, and cut vegetables or wash dishes as the sun sets and the day slips into night. It’s a nice feeling. Once it’s dark, I’ll turn on the standing floor lamp and it alone is fine for me to eat by, or play a card game, or do the things that one does in the service of leisure. But then my wife comes home and inevitably switches on the 2000 lumen ring-fluorescent fixture overhead. Sometimes she does need it to do schoolwork or to write something, but for her it is habit, normal, atarimae. It destroys my good mood, both consciously and subconsciously. I’ve spent a good many hours shopping for fancy LED fixtures that can adjust their color temperature with the click of a button, but my good wife has always prevailed upon me that they are too expensive and an unjustifiable expense.

If such a purchase could end our arguments over light temperature, budget would not be a concern. But alas, we do not own this house and we will not be here forever.

What got me thinking about this post (other than wondering when my wife will come home) was something one of my adult English students said to me. Last fall, she travelled to Victoria, BC, to attend an English language school for two weeks. A homestay was part of her package, and she had great things to say about her host family. But she admitted to me that she wasn’t really able to study like she had hoped. Her bedroom had only warmly-colored lamps that were too indirect and dim for her to study from. She told me that she would wake up early every morning so that she could study by the dawn light near the window. She never asked her host family for what she needed.

So, what is the determining factor here? Are Japanese more practically minded? Are Americans more leisure minded? Have Japanese preferences been shaped and confined by a limited and uncreative array of product offerings? Have American preferences been shaped and guided by a commercial notion of what is homey? I think there are many dichotomies between these two cultures that are corollaries of this one. The arrangement of offices – Americans in cubicles with bosses in separate offices and Japanese in banks of desks with the bosses ostentatiously placed at their head. Consider the difference between the typical teachers’ room of a Japanese public school, and the teachers’ lounge of an American one. I’ve been in a few teachers’ lounges in Alaska that put suites in 5-star hotels to shame, stocked with coffee and coronary-inducing snacks. And of course, they were tastefully and warmly lit with standing floor lamps.

For now, my own musings on this are just that. But the study of cultural geography is a real field, and there is no doubting that Japanese homes and Japanese towns and Japanese campgrounds look different than their North American counterparts, and that those differences hew to a certain mean that we can at least try to come close to defining. What is the thread that runs through each system of preferences? What is the essence of these opposing ways of perceiving what is comforting and what is unsettling?

Categories
Japan Palmer

Winter Holidays in Japan

A version of this post appears in the Palmer Sister City Newsletter this month.

As I write this, Christmas is fast approaching, and even here in Japan, there are many reminders. Japan celebrates Christmas in the same way it celebrates halloween – as an excuse to have a party, eat a bit of unhealthy food, and a new way for businesses to advertise.

However, because Thanksgiving is completely unknown in Japan, there is nothing to act as a buffer between the spookiness of Halloween and the cheer of Christmas. Any American living in Japan will surely lament an entire November of Christmas music and Santa displays at the grocery store. And once the day does come, it’s celebrated very differently. Living abroad over Christmas time makes one realize the effort that goes into this kind of tradition, and the importance of maintaining it.

Japan has its own Christmas traditions, which may seem rather amusing to someone used to Western-style Christmases:

  • Christmas Eve is romantic. That’s right, the night before christmas is not a night of peaceful reflection and quality time with family. With so few Christians in Japan, the religious meaning isn’t there. It’s a date night, pure and simple.

  • Christmas is all about the Christmas Cake. This tradition of eating a heavy fruit or sponge cake comes from the United Kingdom and the countries of the Commonwealth and is widespread in Japan. While America has a tradition of giving fruitcakes, the Japanese take their cakes much more seriously, often ordering them weeks ahead of time.

  • Christmas is also all about… fried chicken. At some point, it became common knowledge in Japan that this is what you eat on Christmas. Whether it stems from a misunderstanding of the turkey and poultry culinary traditions of the winter holidays, or an genius marketing ploy by KFC, a bucket of fried chicken is how a Japanese family rings in the holiday.

  • Christmas Day is not a national holiday. People go to work, and children go to school. Being raised to think of the day as special and a time for many important things – none of them work – it is very odd to go teach class or sit in an office on Christmas Day as if it were a day like any other.

All of this is not to say that the Japanese do not celebrate family and food and fun over the dark days of winter. A lot of the traditions that Western nations take care of on December 25th are just done a bit later by Japanese families, over the new year. That’s the time when you lie around the house, gain a few pounds from non-stop feasting, and make the long trip home through snowstorms and icy roads to share the physical and spiritual bonds of family. With that to look forward to only a week later, Christmas sounds like a pretty nice excuse for a romantic plate of fried chicken topped off with a slice of cake, doesn’t it?

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Hokkaido Saroma travel

A Story of Saroma Lake

The Age of Freshwater

If one were to write a biography of Saroma Lake, it would need two separate volumes. One for the age of freshwater, and one for the age of brackishness. Saroma Lake (Saromako in Japanese) is the third largest lake in Japan, after Lake Biwa and Lake Kasumigaura. Shallow and calm, it sits on Hokkaido’s northern coast, the long arc of its shore cradling the Sea of Okhotsk like a bassinet, lest it spill through to the Sea of Japan and the Pacific.

Saroma Lake was once known as Saroma Lagoon, called so by explorers traveling through the waters off the coast and along the narrow strip of land between it and the sea. At that time it was mostly a freshwater lake, fed by the Saromabetsu and Baro rivers, swelling in the spring and summer and freezing solid in the winter, as drift ice packed the shores of the Okhotsk.

As lakes go in Japan, Saroma is large. It’s the third largest by area in Japan, a point of pride in the neighboring town of the same name, even though it is hardly known elsewhere in Japan. For comparison, it would be the 83rdlargest lake if it were in America.

Perhaps it lacks the mystique that Japan’s deep volcanic lakes possess. Lakes such as Tazawa, Shikotsu, and Kussharo, nestled in mountains and ancient craters, impossibly deep yet incredibly clear. Saroma is only 60 feet at its deepest, compared to the astonishing 1000-foot depth of Shikotsu in southern Hokkaido, a lake which has only half the area but contains 16 times the volume of water.

An inability to define the lake is part of its character. Simultaneously on a “top three” list and yet unknown, large yet shallow, created by freshwater yet influenced by tides, it’s a body of water that goes unnoticed while being incredibly important.

Viewing Saroma Lake on a map, or from a high vantage point like an airplane or a nearby mountain, one notices something unique about the shape and location of the lake. It looks like it’s trying to escape from Hokkaido itself, pressing itself flat onto the boundary of the coast. It’s almost part of the ocean.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was: a shallow estuary and small indentation along the northern coastline. 30,000 years ago, Hokkaido was the last stop for human land migrations from Siberia and Sakhalin over the land bridge that is now La Perouse strait, between Wakkanai and Sakhalin’s southern tip. Over these fresh and fleeting lowlands, came Asiatic brown bears, pikas, and other animals more typically found in Siberia. Hokkaido’s southern strait between Honshu, the violent Tsugaru Kaikyo, is much deeper and served as an ecological and anthropological firewall. This is why there are no monkeys on Hokkaido, and no brown bears on Honshu.

Gradually, erosive tides, winds, and the interminable grinding of rivers deposited sand and sediment into the basin of the lake. Through a process still debated by science, an arc-shaped berm of earth was gradually built that created a new lake, separate from the ocean.

Over the ensuing ages, as rivers such as the Saromabetsu and the Baro delivered more and more freshwater into what had once been an ocean, the lake gradually became a freshwater lake with its own unique ecosystem. In time, an outlet developed from the lake at its eastern end. Every spring, as snowmelt from the mountains flowed through the rivers, it would cause the lake to swell. The water level would rise until it burst into the ocean at the lowest point of the ocean-separating berm – at its eastern end. This annual occurrence caused the section of the lake near this outlet to become open to the ocean for several months in the summer, and brackish from seawater that would flush back in after the discharge, creating a wonderful environment to grow and farm scallops and oysters.

This abundance of protein was reason enough for the indigenous Ainu, who were usually sparsely dispersed across the island, to maintain a permanent settlement near present-day Sakaeura, Kitami City. Part of the Okhotsk Culture, during the Jomon Era (12,000 BC – 300 BC) the site is of major archaeological interest and is the location of an extension office of Tokyo University, with a museum and recreation of the ancient Ainu settlement.

The Ainu used the lake as the source of their livelihoods, and they named it and the surrounding places based on their natural features. The name Saroma comes from the Ainu “Saro-oma”, or “place of reeds and rushes,” which were in abundance along the lake’s shallow and fluctuating littoral. Like many Ainu names in Hokkaido (over 90% of placenames in Hokkaido are of Ainu origin), the assigned Chinese characters for “Saroma” are laughably meaningless. The three characters: 佐呂間 mean assistant, backbone, and between. Seeing names like this, I rather wonder why the Japanese even bothered. I think some agree, and often the name of the lake and the nearby town are written in katakana as サロマ, representing only the phonetics and eschewing the inappropriately chosen ideographs shown above.

A few years ago, I took a bike ride down to the abandoned old outlet of the lake, which no longer connects to the ocean and is full of brackish and standing water. On a map, this end of the lake looks like snake roadkill, winding and narrow, with bulging sections, going nowhere. Riding along the paved road between the lake and the ocean from the nature center, one soon encounters a “no entry” sign, but I believe such signs are best ignored. More often than not, while exploring a park or wandering through a hotel, I will find myself coming out from behind one of these signs, even though I never crossed one upon entry. There are usually things worth seeing behind those signs.

As the narrowing road meandered along, it disappeared from the map. Soon, to my surprise, and in confirmation of the aforementioned rule, I came across a beautiful stone monument marking the location of the lake’s erstwhile connection to the sea. It read:

“The Former Mouth of Saroma Lake:
Originally, the outlet connecting the lake to the ocean was in this vicinity.  Every spring people would dig to help reopen the channel. In Showa 4 (1929) a drainage channel was excavated on the Yubetsu end of the lake, causing tides to affect the lake and naturally close this outlet.

A map of videos and photos around Saroma Lake.

The Age of Brackishness

The Japanese began to colonize Hokkaido in the late 1860’s and 70’s, sending soldier-farmers to homestead the far reaches of the undeveloped wilderness, in order to establish a presence to ward off the colonial ambitions of foreign nations, especially the Russian Empire. Formerly called EzoHokkaido was given its present name and established as a territory of the Japanese Empire, in 1869. This was only two years after Russia sold its territories in North America to the United States, which would become the State of Alaska nearly 100 years later.

As settlers began to slowly enter the area during those beginning years after the Meiji Restoration swept westernization through Japan, even bringing in American advisors from Massachusetts to design the streets and factories in Sapporo, the capital city, it didn’t take long for them to capitalize on the natural resources of the island, where they were abundant. One natural convenience they made use of was the abundance of scallops and oysters of eastern Saroma Lake, bringing methods of cultivation from areas in Honshu.

As more people moved into the region and a fishing industry became established, the small saltwater arm of Saroma Lake began to be coveted by other fishermen on other parts of the lake, who could not cultivate ocean species in the calm freshwater shallows. In 1929, the fishermen on the western end, 25 miles away in present day Yubetsu, decided to take nature into their own hands. The lake was right next to the ocean. It wouldn’t take much more than a few pieces of machinery and some men to make their own outlet into the lake, to create for themselves the same favorable conditions the eastern fishermen had.

They did this without the approval of the local or central government, and were eventually forced to stop. However, as lore has it, a storm soon blew through and the surge of rising tides finished the job they had gone into half-cocked. Today, the western lake mouth remains open, along with a newer second mouth near the eastern end, constructed to equalize the effect of tides on the lake. Both mouths are ringed with massive booms to keep the Okhotsk drift ice out in the dead of winter.

Nature lovers surely see this all as a disgrace – an example of humanity running rampant over the environment, causing the extermination of the lake’s endemic species, giving thought only to their own immediate needs.

The fishermen of today would likely see it differently. From the eastern port of Sakaeura west to the fishing ports of Hamasaroma, Toppushi, Kerochi, Baro, and Yubetsu, scallops and oysters are the cash species that supports the very comfortable lifestyles of those fishermen with substantial allotments of cultivation areas in the lake.

Saroma Lake now supports a massive cultivation operation – 150 square kilometers of hanging nets full of scallops and oysters. It is part of the Hokkaido scallop fishery, the largest in the world, hauling in 410,000 metric tons of scallops annually. These are exported to China, Europe and the US. Perhaps as some sort of consolation prize for the damage done so many years ago, the fishery was certified this May by the Marine Stewardship Council’s global standard for sustainable and well-managed fisheries.

I have experienced the harvest of Saroma Lake’s scallops firsthand over the past several years. Every May, for a period of about 10 days, fishermen in Toppushi port harvest scallops. Every morning at 3AM, with the sun peeking over the eastern horizon, dozens of boats race out of the port to haul in hundreds of hanging nets full of chigai, or young scallops. The shells are about the size of an oreo, their inner meat about the size of a dime. But these scallops aren’t yet ready for market. After being raised from egg-like “spat” to a decent size over a year within the frigid womb of Saroma Lake, they are transferred onto a ship which hauls them to a designated site off the Okhotsk coast. There they are left in a practice known as “scallop ranching.” They will be retrieved two or three years later by a fleet of trawlers, after which they are shucked, steamed or sliced or dried, and shipped around the world.

The Kawabatas, who run a family fishing operation out of Toppushi port, invite me along to help every year. Feeling the brisk morning air from the deck of a fishing boat brings me a sense of freedom, and a jolt from the routineness of life as a teacher. The mindless, back-breaking work of dumping bivalves into crates for four hours before work is in a way meditative, the separation of the thinking mind from the active body. And there is a satisfaction in seeing a three-thousand pound mountain of scallop crates that does not compare to the more delayed and less visceral gratification of white-collar work. During the ten days of the harvest, the Kawabatas, one of hundreds of fishing families on the lake, gathered 130 million of the young scallops. As thanks for my labor, I received a few thousand of those baby scallops (and a case of beer), and spent the better part of a Saturday steaming them in sake, shucking and cleaning them, then freezing them to be used in a variety of pastas, quiches, stir-fries, and stews.

The Ainu of pre-Meiji Japan in effect had laid the groundwork for the future industries of the colonizing (many would prefer “invading”) Japanese. Areas of abundance were well known to the Ainu, and after having those areas taken from them, or taxed out of their reach, many were taken forcibly from place to place to work for a pittance. Kayano Shigeru describes the brutality of this practice in his memoir Our Land Was a Forest, in which his grandfather is forced into conscripted labor for the resource-extracting corporations that began the development of Hokkaido.

The Ainu did have one more reason to live so permanently at the lake’s eastern end, one that the Japanese could not exploit so easily for commercial gain. If one visits Sakaeura, and drives across the massive steel span bridging the port and narrow eastern slough, they will arrive at Wakka Nature Center. Today it is a popular spot in the mid-summer months when Siberian lily, dragonhead, and Japanese rose come into bloom. Take a walk or bike on the paved path, cross the second lake mouth, over the rushing tides that course through the narrow opening, and continue on the lake side as the road turns to a reddish gravel. There you will find a freshwater spring, paradoxically situated on a slice of land a few hundred meters wide and no more than 3 meters high, sandwiched between two saltwater expanses. Wakka in the Ainu language, naturally, means water.

This slice, this strip of land from which wakka springs forth, is now an island, manmade, orphaned from its mainland. No road runs along its 15km length, and a bridge extends only over the second, eastern mouth. In the age of freshwater though, it was something of a superhighway along the northern coast, serving as an unobstructed east-west route for the Ainu, animals, and the occasional explorer.

This road between lake and sea was the route of British explorer and anthropologist Arnold Henry Savage Landor as he made his way around Ezo in the early 1890’s by way of pack mule. In his memoir of that trip,Alone With the Hairy Ainu, he recounts his route northwest up the coast. Landor describes spending the night at the village of “Tobuts”, present day Tofutsu, near the former lake mouth. There he “entertained himself” to an oyster supper in the Ainu village, and describes sketching the portait of an “Ainu belle’ who was “not nearly so hairy as most.”

The morning after his romantic idyll, Landor went on his way:

Continuing my journey north, on the stretch of sand between the water of the sea and that of the Saruma  lake the travelling was fairly easy but monotonous. The long chain of mountains on the other side of the lake was magnificent in the morning light. For twenty-two miles this went on.

Nature’s Fulcrum

One hundred and fifty years have passed since Landor’s misadventure through Hokkaido. Five million people now live on this island the size of Maine, still a virtual emptiness by Japanese standards. Boats ply the lake through channels crossing between buoys holding billions of scallops and oysters. Thousands of people live in the surrounding towns and many come each day to visit the lake and admire its expansive beauty. But people stick close to home. They get back in their cars. They see the place, but they don’t feel it. I would guess that more people travelled the expanse of sandy oblivion in the 1880’s than set foot on it today.

There is something primeval about the thin line between lake and ocean of the shore beyond Wakka. It’s like standing on a massive mountain ridge, but more sublime, pressed between opposing waves. A place home only to deer, fox and swans. This easily accessible isolation is almost spiritual, a juxtaposition of land into water, of freshwater from salty surroundings.

I had lived 25 minutes by car from Wakka for five years before I finally ventured to its farthest reaches. By cycle, kayak, foot and snowshoe, I had tramped and paddled around most of Saroma Lake, but never to the end. I had seen that far tip from the Yubetsu side, thrown rocks across the awkward channel opened by those fishermen to unlock the riches of the lake.

But I had never been there. Anyway, you weren’t really supposed to go. There was a rusted old “no entry” sign and a dirt road which became less and less passable on a mountain bike after a few kilometers, as the dwarf bamboo overtook the path. But for me, the pilgrimage needed to be made.

At 7am on a blazing June morning, I and four Western friends set out from the nature center to make the 30km round trip. We filled up our water bottles from the spring at Wakka, hid our bikes in the woods, and began trudging along the high berm of the island. Refrigerators and buoys, vodka bottles and tubes of Korean toothpaste littered the beach below. This stretch of beach is a beachcomber’s paradise, and a well kept secret. Nik Hill, a former English teacher in Saroma Town, called it the “Golden Mile of Wakka.”

We remained on the solid ridge for as long as we could before venturing to the beach, which is awkward and tiring walking. I quickly came across the vertebra of a whale interspersed with vodka bottles. We began to find glass fishing floats, which I treasure, and gain a rush of excitement in laying eyes upon. Before the day was over, I would stuff over 20 floats into my pack, including a gorgeous blue 8-inch diameter globe.

In spite of all of my pseudo-poetic warblings about Wakka’s spiritual isolation, the explorer Landor was right about its monotony. The Wakka Coast is a rather boring slog. Gradually, though, the beach narrows and turns into small cliffs, topped with the scraggliest, spookiest little trees I have ever seen, whispering for you to turn back. Swallows make their homes in these cliffs, flitting about the beach, clearing it of insects for us, its daytripping visitors. Towering remnants of past erosion served as a reminder of the impermanence of these cliffs, and made me think that it really is best there are no people here.

In Japan, coastlines tend to be smothered in concrete, sprinkled in tetrapods and spheres and plastered with 20 meter seawalls whose ugliness will fail to be worth it as soon as the next 21-meter tsunami hits. The total absence of this is what makes this coastline special, and its presence is what made its end point so remarkably jarring.

After passing the swallow cliffs, the land on the left widens outward toward the lake, and there begins a wide sloping meadow of dwarf bamboo, a knee-high and hearty underbrush that remains green throughout the winter, even buried under meters of snow. Now far behind the rest of the group, I stopped trying to keep up, and walked up through this slope to a low, forested knob. There, I turned and looked back down the length of land, at both shores tapering away toward their geometric vanishing points. It was a special place to be. While I am not a religious person, I find the animism of Japanese Shinto to be a soothing concept, with its spiritual view of the souls that live in nature’s special places. This was certainly one of those places. It felt like I had reached the fulcrum of the island, the point at which its own balance was reached. I took a drink of water, and turned to go.

Categories
Alaska Hokkaido

Internet Speeds: Hokkaido vs. Alaska

In 1998, when I was in 8th grade, Rogers Cablesystems began a cable internet service in the Matanuska Valley in Alaska where I grew up. I remember going into their strip mall office near Wasilla High to pick up the modem, and the technician grinning as he warned me “You’ll never be able to go back to dialup.”

That connection was 512kb down, 33.6 up (you needed a phone line to send data). If my memory serves me correctly, the cost was about $60 per month, and the modem about $10 a month. Gosh was that fast. Before, I had used a 33.6kb modem because I couldn’t afford a full 56kb model. I went from downloading Mp3s off of Napster at 8KB/s to 60KB/s. My life had indeed changed, and I have never gone back.

That was 15 years ago. Since then, I have moved abroad, but I often yearn to move back in moments of homesickness, and simple want – it’s natural to want to return to a place with which you identify so strongly and where so many family and friends are. But as an adult, I always begin to think about practical things – job, healthcare, housing. Internet access is among those things. So, every now and then I click over to the Matanuska Telephone Association website and see what they’re charging for DSL.

I am continually stunned. No improvements in service in the sense that you would imagine. Their lowest connection costs $55/month with a $25GB/month download cap (my 512kb connection in 1998 had no cap). I do see that they are offering fiber in some areas, which is great, but the costs are outrageous. $110 dollars per month for a 40 megabit connection, also with a $25 gigabyte download cap. I don’t understand who would buy this plan. On a connection like that, you could download 25 gigabytes in an hour.

I simply don’t understand what the reasons or excuses are for zero improvement in services or reduction in prices over the past 15 years. I understand that Alaska has a limited connection to the rest of the US, and that bandwidth is not cheap. But how does the rest of the world provide far better service? I live in a rural Japanese town of 6,000 people, about 30 miles from the nearest city, and I am writing this on an unlimited fiberoptic connection that costs me ~$50 dollars a month.

So let’s compare:

Ok, so these are a bunch of nice numbers, but unfortunately they are all the same size. Let’s make the font sizes proportional to the vast gulf in services:

Here in rural Japan, I am paying 1/5th as much for a service that is 2.5-8 times as fast. Someone explain this to me. I can’t give up my fiber.

Categories
Uncategorized

An Interview with Myself

Today I dropped by the town hall and found a letter on my desk from a university in Tokyo, written on fancy letterhead. It was a request to complete a survey of ALTs. It focused on ALT’s experiences in and attitudes toward teaching English in Japan, and intended to help improve English language education in the future.

I intended to answer the survey online quickly and be done with it, but while answering it, I soon realized that I actually had some strong opinions and very specific answers that I wanted to share. It ended up taking me nearly 45 minutes to complete. I decided it would be a shame if my written responses were simply swallowed up into the survey, rather than used for personal reflection or even as a conversation starter among ALTs (who probably have also received this survey.) Considering that my written responses are my own intellectual property, I thought I would republish them here:

What do you think are your strengths as a teacher of English in Japan?

I have a realistic attitude toward what is possible with only 35 hours of team-taught instruction per year. Yet I am independent and forward thinking in the lessons that I plan for students and the materials that I use to introduce them to English and foreign cultures.

What aspects about your culture or country do you teach to students?

Simply reading storybooks from your own country can be a useful activity, since it allows students to make both active and passive connections to different ways of expressing emotions and humor, structuring a story, and even styles of drawing.

In planning of classes, what do you think is important to discuss with JTE’s?

It is very important for each to know what each person’s responsibilities are for preparation, and also important that those responsibilities both be shared and co-evaluated between teachers.

What do you find advantageous in teaching with a JTE?

It allows students in the classroom to see a realistic model for their own use of English. ALTs may be good pronunciation models, great ambassadors and introducers of culture, and great friends to students, but it is unrealistic to think that the students will ever attain native linguistic or cultural proficiency. The JTE is the only member of the teaching team who can be a practical role model for students.

Please write freely any comments you have about your relationship with JTEs.

I think it is important to develop personal relationships with JTEs. While I believe in a separation between work and personal life as much as possible, it really does make a difference to socialize with JTEs. It is one reason why I strongly believe that ALTs should remain at as few schools as possible and make only one school visit per day. “Downtime” in the teachers’ room is not downtime – it can be used for meaningful interaction between ALT and JTE. Conversations that I have had during this time have actually been one of the greatest sources of useful and innovative lesson ideas during my tenure as an ALT. Ideas come much more naturally in casual conversation than in planned meetings.

What are the reasons for your using Japanese in class?

Very rarely for classroom management (perhaps if the JTE is out of the room for more than 5-10 minutes) and also sparingly used to develop metalinguistic awareness about a teaching goal.

Please write freely any comments you have about your relationship with students.

Since every teacher has problems with students, I felt it would have been dishonest to write that I did not. That said, the problems are few and typically dealt with easily and nearly always confined to certain groups or individual students. I find it’s typically an easy matter to deal with problems, particularly when you have the support of a JTE.

What suggestions do you have, if any, that might help improve English education in Japan?

Expectations need to be set higher. Elementary students do not need to be babied by avoiding phonics and spelling, but they also do not need to be graded in order to make them “learn.” Hours of instruction need to increase. The job of ALT needs to be professionalized, both via hiring policy/pay and the responsibility taken on by ALTs themselves. There need to be more ALTs in schools – one in each elementary school would do wonders for students, the support of JTEs, and for the ALT’s own work satisfaction by being able to feel like they are an insider and a member of a team who share common goals. The list goes on, but these are the points that I see as being realistically accomplished within my lifetime.

Do you have any memorable episodes in your interactions with your students in and/or out of class?

In order for teachers to teach well, they need to know what students already know and bring to the classroom from their own homes, individual experience, and culture. Teachers also need to know what students can already do. For an ALT to be able to know these things and use that knowledge effectively, they need to listen, which depends on time and strong teaching and community relationships. Once they have a good understanding of this, they can make appropriate connections to students’ lives, and also challenge students with things they can’t yet do. Trying new things together is often the only way for real learning to happen. A teacher should learn along with their students, especially in the case of JTEs.

A good example of what I consider “real learning” happened in a Skype class that we conducted in a 5th grade elementary class with a 5th grade class in America. Each class presented their weekly class schedules in English, and made comparisons between the different school days and lesson times. At the end of the lesson, the two classes played a gesture game, in which one side of the Skype session acted out an activity from a school subject, and the other class tried to guess what the subject was. An “Aha” moment occurred when the class in America acted out reading a book to represent English, or “Language Arts” as it is called in North America. Our students immediately understood, but they shouted out “Japanese” which they had learned for kokugo, the native Japanese term for Japanese language study. They were confused at first, but soon realized that the “kokugo” of America is indeed English. Not only was this an amazing “light bulb” experience for them, but it was a real learning experience for me, because it helped me better understand the kinds of assumptions and misunderstandings that students are prone to make when learning a foreign language or culture, but that I would never have predicted by myself.

Do you have further comments on any aspects of your work as an ALT?

The job of an ALT is one that is shaped enormously by the person who fills it. It’s also one that can very quickly become either unbearably frustrating, or unbearably boring. I think that a significant burden falls on ALTs like myself to expand the role of the ALT in Japan so that we are used more effectively, as well as to constantly try new things so that our lessons improve over time. Maintaining a positive attitude toward this end is key.

Categories
Japan Palmer Saroma

Saroma Recipe: Tofu Dumplings with Jam Topping

Ingredients:

For tofu dumplings with spinach:

  • 80 grams Shiratama-ko rice flour
  • 100 grams soft tofu
For regular tofu dumplings:
  • 80 grams Shiratama-ko rice flour
  • 100 grams soft tofu
Suggested jam toppings: rhubarb jam, strawberry jam, pumpkin jam

Cooking Instructions: (for both types of dumpling)

  1. First, lets prepare the spinach dumplings. Lightly boil the spinach. After boiling, wring out the water and dice it into fine bits.
  2. Add the rice flour to the diced spinach. Then, slowly add tofu to the mixture until it becomes about as soft as an earlobe.
  3. Form the mixture into child bite-sized dumplings, making an indentation in the middle of each with your thumb, which will shorten the cooking time.
  4. Let’s next prepare the regular dumplings, following the above instructions without the spinach.
  5. Insert the dumplings in a pot of boiling water and boil for one minute after they naturally float to the surface. After removing from the boiling water, cool the dumplings in a bowl of cold water.
  6. Place two or three of each type of dumpling on plates, and garnish with your choice of jam.
Watch out for: When mixing the tofu and rice flour, be sure to add the tofu a little at a time so that you can control the hardness and water content of the final mixture. The smoother the dumpling mix turns out, the better the finished product will be.
✦ This recipe is courtesy of Mr. Onishi, the nutritionist at the Saroma Town Hall. The recipe originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of the Saroma Town Magazine. View it in the magazine here. (it’s on the second page of the PDF.)
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