I had to go to the Iwate Agricultural Junior College yesterday to teach some English and make a presentation about American customs. These are kids right out of high school, who are learning how to work the fields and grow vegetables - learning English is not number one on their priority list. The Japanese teacher told me to “have a conversation with them, real casual” and I had trouble getting more than a “Hi, my name is ~” out of them. To be honest, that’s always the way it’s been for me, “teaching” English, from the most advanced high school to the backwaters school in the sticks. Even if a Japanese person knows English, they seem to be pretty reticient at showing it (that, and, I’m a horrible teacher of English! that could be it).

These students were about to embark on a school trip to America, where they’d study for about 2 weeks at a local college and get to see the sights. So I was to be there as sort of a “first-encounter” native, or something. I went over what to say at the immigration desk, and I told them that even if I was speaking clearly and correctly, that the immigration officer might use more, how shall we say, real English. They’re all like 19 and 20 though, so I don’t expect them to really listen to me, but…they’re 19 and 20, and they’ll be just fine. I told them stuff like how to pay with a credit card and how to easily calculate tips for restaurants, and basically just smile and be happy because that will get you through anything. It’s worked for me!

The teacher was disappointed, wishing that the students would be more excited about this trip. There were some boys napping while I spoke, and girls chatting with their friends. I just sort of figured that they had no idea what it would be like, so it was almost pointless to explain all of this to them. You never really know until you get to a place what it’s going to be like, so it’s a waste of energy to worry about it *tell this to my 21 year old self, itching to go to Ritsumeikan and not getting contact from them for six months lol.

On the way out, we stopped at a tiny farmer’s market the students had set up, with fresh-cut flowers and juicy, sweet-looking tomatoes and peppers. These kids were tan, muscled, and dirty, and they looked liked they knew the land and what they could grow from it. I never knew that kind of stuff. I never even thought about it. I think it’s great that Iwate, still abundant with farmland, has young people around to take care of the next generation. I can’t think of anyone I grew up with that wanted to be a farmer. One of the students chatted happily with the teacher I was with about how they got the tomatoes to turn orange, and what vitamins were in them, and how good for you they were. And it’s just one more proof that being smart has nothing to do with what grade you got in English class.

Two young girls ran up to us and chatted with me and the teacher for a while. They were pleased that I could speak Japanese, and chatted freely and energetically - not a trace of that classic shyness that I always get whenever I try to talk to people in a classroom. And I thought, maybe this is it - it’s not English and it’s not the teaching that’s the problem here. It’s the classroom. Once Japanese people are outside the classroom, outside that huge group of students that they may feel the pressure to conform to, it becomes so much easier to talk to them, even with me being a huge scary foreigner. One of the girls was cradling tomatoes in her shirt and handed me one, and it was the juiciest, sweetest tomato I had ever eaten. I don’t even like tomatoes.

While we were walking through the hallways a group of boys started talking to us, and a loud boy with spiky hair shouted, “HELLO! My name is Shigeki!” in English to me. And then another boy gasped and said in Japanese, “What? No, I’m Shigeki, he’s just playing. He’s Yutaro.”

I called to the first boy in English. “Hey, Yutaro. You lied to me!”

He turned around, shocked. “PARDON ME?” he said in English, mouth agape. He meant it was “excuse me, I didn’t understand,” but it still sort of fit the situation, now didn’t it. Sometimes I feel like what I do is not really that important, but it’s moments like that, those perfectly strange moments, that make my job worth having. Communication is not perfect language skills, it’s something much deeper and more intangible, and I feel once someone realizes that is when they realize the joy of learning another language.

One year ago, I found out I was upgraded to JET.

I had given up all hope; I was at my darkest point. Even as I was setting up an interview for another company, I figured I would fail that too, just like everything else. I was lost. Japan was so far away from me, and something that had seemed to sure and so right was now something so impossibly unattainable. The more I wanted it, the more the dream of living and working in Japan slipped out of my fingers.

Until I got my chance back, that lonely night in a hotel in Boston, like nothing had happened. My fortunes had changed so abruptly that it was almost like…like someone had planned it that way. I don’t know if I believe in God, but it sort of felt like my two months of suffering (which was really nothing in the grand scheme of things) was there to show me something. No matter how much I thought I deserved Japan, I had only just made it. I had eked through by the skin of my teeth. Only now that I realized how hard it was could I really appreciate what was being given to me.

It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to get upset at random things here, to get moody. Heck, I got in a snit yesterday for having no plans this weekend, even though I am exhausted lately and really need a break. Well, I’ve always been moody, but sometimes, especially in the beginning, it was so hard for me to break out of it. Everyone I met was new. I was always trying to prove myself. I was on my own for the first time. A relationship I had been in for years was over. I got a crush on someone where the constant will they or won’t they drove me crazy (don’t lie, i still feel this way). For a while, I started liking someone else who treated me horribly, but in a way, I felt I deserved it. I was lonely. I felt like no one understood me, and that no one ever would.

But…after that JET passed away in January, something changed inside of me. I remembered just how lucky I have it, just to be alive. I remembered how little time we really have. And I remembered just how unbelievably lucky I was to be in Japan, because I had forgotten and taken for granted my job and my life here and the fact that it had been so hard. It’s difficult to remember that sometimes. But everytime something gets me upset, I just take a second, take a walk, take a bike ride, and pay attention to the world around me. I wouldn’t have had a chance to see this, if I hadn’t gotten so lucky. I take another breath. It’s fun here, even if I fail. Even if I am lonely. Even if things don’t go my way. Because I am here.

And that’s all it takes to get me on the right track. Maybe those couple of months last year, when I thought I had screwed everything up and would never get back here, were my reminder. They were a way of telling me that even when things get tough here, it was still so much better than last year, so quit whining and appreciate what you have. I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess I wouldn’t erase those two months for anything.

Headline reads: Play in English with Amanda-san

(yes this only ran in a newspaper with a circulation less than the courier post. let me have my moment!)

A large part of my job involves going out to various schools in the prefecture and teaching about America. Oh, scratch that - it mainly has to do with them introducing a foreigner to the students and teaching them a bit of English. Still, it’s a chance for me to go to schools and interact with children, which I don’t get to do very often. It can get a bit boring always being in an office with other adults, so even though I get nervous about “performing” (and annoyed with the prep work) it always turns out to be a lot of fun. I’m not particularly good at playing with children! I’ll admit it! But even I can get them running and jumping and laughing and not wanting to leave. By the end, I don’t much want to leave either.

To be honest, doing cultural workshops with children is the best way to get Japan ready for their coming influx of foreigners (unless they just want millions of jobs to go untaken once their already massive elderly population gets even larger) and I wish there were more of them. This event was in Kanegasaki, a small little field of white in the middle of nowhere. You know how many foreigners these children get to see? It’s easy to see western foreigners on the tv and think all of us are perfect, plastic (and usually white) people with pearly teeth, so it’s really fulfilling for me to go into a classroom and show them I’m just as much of a living, breathing person as they are. Foreigners just look different than what they’re used to. When you’re a child, those physical differences can seem much more important than they are (heck, who am I kidding? They’re much more important to adults than they should be either).

You play a game with them, you mention you like Pokemon just as much as they do, and suddenly foreigners become a lot less intimidating and little tiny bit more relatable. I want Japanese children to grow up and think of foreigners as just as normal as they are, not some scary creatures who will scream English epithets at them “HELLO HOW ARE YOU IM FINE AND YOU?” It would be nice to create a fascination in a young child about America just like the fascination I had with Japan that grew out of a silly little show about collecting monsters. Because in the end, it’s the memories you make in your childhood, it’s the impressions made in the middle of a snow-filled day, that really stay with you for the rest of your life.

“Hey, Amanda, guess what?” a little girl of maybe 5 said to me once. “My friend says that foreigners are scary. But I met you, and you’re not scary at all!” If my job means teaching little children that we’re all humans at the end of the day, then consider my job satisfaction at 100%.

(Plus, I-san saw that photo and said we have to play this game at the next drinking party. You wish, I-san!! :3) 

I was in the middle of scarfing down my yogurt when Y-san came up to me. “Amanda, would you like to go to the shrine and pray for the new year? You said the other day you wanted to try it.” She was referring to 初詣 Hatsumode, the first shrine visit of the new year, where you throw some money in the box, jangle a bell, and pray for good luck this year. I guess you could go to a Buddhist temple too, but most people go to the local Shinto shrine, with the big red (or stone) torii gates. In our case, there’s a shrine one street over from the prefectural office, perfect for a quick lunchtime visit.

“But it looks so cold outside,” I whinged, not wanting to go through the hassle of putting on my snow boots, but she laughed at me in such a way that I knew I was just being ridiculous (and cranky and tired). Well, she’s right. No matter what happens to me and my life in Japan, I’m never gonna know just how many more shrine visits I might have. I have to seize the moment while I’ve got it! It’s easy to settle into a routine here, because my time is not limited the way it was in Kyoto, but one of the things Kyoto taught me was that life is a lot more fun if you live like every day is your last day (not JUST a lame country lyric!)

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6 am - My alarm goes off.

6:30 am - I finally stop hitting snooze and wake up. Take a shower, get dressed, do lady stuff. MAY OR MAY NOT EAT BREAKFAST (I’m at a 50% eat-or-not-eat rate right now, looking to raise it!). Watch the news (ie, read Perez Hilton and don’t pay attention to the news)

8:00 am - Watch the zodiac fortune telling section on the news. Is Sagitarrius going to be unlucky today, again?? Before this I try to catch “Kyou no Wanko (Today’s Pup!)” which showcases a different dog everyday from somewhere in Japan. I usually make baby nonsense noises that no one will understand during this time.

8:05 am - Set off for work!

8:15 am - Get to work! It’s cold!

8:17 am - Walk in my office, scream “Ohayou gozaimasu (GOOD MORNING)” to the people already in there, which is usually just C-kacho and T-san (yo I’m debating just going all Natsume Soseki and calling everyone by their first letters when I write about them), because I am incredibly early for a non-permanent worker that will never get a promotion. I turn my computer on and MAYBE have an awkward conversation that never really goes anywhere because my Japanese is weird!

8:30 am - The bell rings, this song plays - I think it’s the Iwate anthem? Or the pref. office anthem? Whatever it is, it is adorable. It’s like school!

8:31 am - 11:59 am - Try to find something to do!

12:00 pm - the bell rings for lunch. YES, there is a bell, and yes everyone takes lunch at the same time, and YES IT IS FOR A WHOLE HOUR. It is wonderful. If you stay at the office, you hear the news being played over the intercom, and at the end of it you hear this chirpy happy song. Once I asked K-san and C-kacho what the heck it meant, and what it was from? and apparently it’s some PR song for Iwate. People either go out to eat, or eat their lunchboxes here and go to sleep.

1:00pm - the bell rings and lights go back on, and everyone’s ready to work!

1:01 pm - 4:30 pm - Try to find something to do!

4:31 pm - I don’t want to leave quite at quitting time, since everyone here is going to be working til like 7, 7:30 and I feel bad. So I dawdle around, go to the bathroom, clean up my area, surf the internet (some more).

4:40 pm - “Okay guys, see ya later!” From here I head downstairs, say goodbye to the guards, and hop on my bike. Sometimes I go shopping downtown, sometimes I go ride my bike around, sometimes I go to the mall, and sometimes I go straight home. A lot of the time I have stuff work related to do so I go home first for an hour before coming back. Let’s just assume I am boring and going straight home!

5:05pm - I make it to the Lawson’s convenience store near my apartments. Sometimes (most of the time) I buy food from here to eat instead of buying real food and making it myself. I usually push my bike the rest of the way because my apartment complex is ON A MOUNTAIN.

5:08pm - I walk by the tiny beauty salon near my apartment and usually the guy inside is staring at me. Whether it’s because I’m pretty or because I’m foreign, I’ll never know!

5:10pm - I am home! But now what do I do.

5:11pm - I throw all my clothes off and walk around half naked until I get cold and finally put my pajamas on.

5:12pm-10:30ish pm - I watch tv/play on the internet/talk to friends until bedtime! During this time I do not blog online or do anything productive like I promised I would, but I do spend about an hour writing in my Real Life Journal about my day. Actually, I’m almost done my first one! I never thought at the end of June that I would actually KEEP WRITING but it has been immensely helpful to me, maybe more helpful than my blogs have been. A lot of stuff I don’t feel comfortable airing out the world! But I’m really glad that I am finally writing it all down. Time to start my little Pokemon journal book :D

SOOOO I’m a bit bored at work! Last week I was swamped with work, and this week it’s like, I’ve had so much freetime that I have actually been reading about Dungeons and Dragons on Wikipedia. I’ve got this huge, super awesome idea that I want to propose at work, but ah. I’m shy. So, I’m mulling that over, working on some presentations and stuff, and preparing for my mom coming to Japan, tomorrow.

Yes, it has finally happened! She is finally coming to visit me! And it’s tomorrow :0 Oh I guess I should run over to the station after work and buy a ticket but I can just do that tomorrow too…It’s kinda a last-minute trip (basically she thinks this is the last time she’s going to have the money for it before she might maybe get laid off who knows), but who cares! I wasn’t doing anything anyway! (except climbing Mount Iwate - maybe next year!) Basically I’m super psyched she’s going to see me IN ACTION.

And heck yes that means I’m bringing her to work!

On Wednesday I had another bad day. They’ve been getting fewer and fewer as I get more and more used to daily working life here, but I still get them. Just the fact that I have bad days has been a little upsetting - it’s easy to romanticize Kyoto, and say that I was just on a perpetual high, but the fact is that whenever I had bad days in Kyoto I was surrounded by friends on all sides to make me feel better. Here, I come home to an empty apartment and my tv. It’s a bit harder to bounce back, is all. I guess it’s just an aspect of Japanese life that I didn’t imagine.

On the other hand, I am having the time of my life here - perhaps more fun that I was having my second month in Kyoto, at least. I feel fucking alive. I am alive in Japan. Whether I have good times or bad times, they’re mine, you know? I made this for myself, and I feel ridiculously free. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The problem is that my mood has just been all over the place this time, so that when I’m having fun, I’m ridiculously happy, and then when something reminds me of how incompetent and childish I still am, I dive to the depths of the earth. Maybe there’s a few reasons for me to be a bit (a lot) moody, and I think I’m getting better at chasing it away by myself, but sometimes I really miss the warm English cocoon that was I-house.

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Well, I’m at work right now and I actually do have a lot of work to do, but it’s lunch time and I have 20 minutes before I have go back to translating and proofreading and scheming what I’m going to do for my school visit at the end of the month. So I’m going to blog!

I’ve been rather busy lately - after work I’m either doing something or I’m too tired to update, and the weekends have been absolutely packed. We had Morioka Orientation at the end of August, and then there was a huge AJET (association of jets) party in Kitakami, a city about an hour from Morioka. I started badminton practice with the other CIRs and other people from our department last Wednesday, and hurt very badly last Thursday and Friday. I went camping in Samuraihama (yes, samurai beach!), drank too much chu-hai and had too much fun, and woke up with about a million mosquito bites centered mainly around my swollen face. There was an athletic meet for the whole department on Tuesday night, and a huge dinner party afterwards. Every day is filled with new things, new discoveries, and new experiences. It’s starting to feel more and more like those first few months in Kyoto did, where I tried vainly to blog but found myself with too much to say, so I didn’t say anything. Still working on the balance, there.

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Here’s my office! Nobody came in yesterday, so I took a quick picture.

And here’s my desk!

I get the silliest spam comments on here. Here’s one from “Lena Shopogolik” from “ishopoglik.ru”:

“WOW! Good thing you kept your wits enough to fight off the bugger. Glad you’re ok. The worse thing to happen to me on that street was when I encountered a pack of dogs late one night. I kept a safe distance behind them until I got home. Take care.”

I don’t even know what that’s in relation to! Did I fight off any buggers, ever? I love that, all that effort that spammer put into putting a completely irrevelant comment on my site. It almost makes me want to go to shopogolik.ru (what is that? the russian word for shopoholic?).

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I just can’t understand it! I’ve had the worst heart burn around the same time every day, and I never get heart burn. It can’t be the food, can it? THIS IS JAPAN, GUYS. You’re not supposed to get heart burn here! It’s got the blandest food in the world (outside of Britain hyuk hyuk)! Is it stress, I wonder? It’s really annoying, but not too much of a problem I guess. I notice I’m watching the same food show I watched yesterday! I guess they just run straight food for an hour at 7 every night? Could this be the cause?? I mean, I only had a banana for breakfast, rice, chirashi zushi, and miso soup for lunch, and chocolate as my choice of poison today. Could it be…that I’ve become sensitive to chocolate?!?? This is unacceptable!

Incidentally, lunch was fun today. Bryan took me, Kawamura-san, and Takada-san to this set-lunch place - it was cheap and delicious! Yeah, I only work with a bunch of dudes, in other words (it’s a wonder we’re not going out for stamina ramen every day). There’s only one woman in my section, and 5 or 6 more in the other section in the room, but essentially my desk is surrounded by Bryan, Kawamura-san, and Takada-san. I mean, it makes it easier for me, in conversation! I don’t mean to say that I can only talk to guys, or that I’m only friends with guys, because that makes it seems like I seek all my validation from male attention (and we all hate those kind of girls too). I just mean that with guys, I know we can at least talk about Pokemon with my limited Japanese. And when I say Pokemon, we really talked about Pokemon at lunch - as in which version we all have to get so we can be equally matched as rivals. Yes, my boss shall be my Pokemon rival! I told you I was going to meet some Pokemon in Iwate, didn’t I?

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Oh man! I’m sorry I’ve been rather absent - I moved into my apartment on uh, Thursday? And by moved, I mean all of my stuff is blown up all around someone else’s apartment. I mean, I guess it’s MY apartment now, but it really doesn’t feel like it. I wake up in the early morning, in a haze, wondering for a half-second, where am I? Am I really in Higashinakanocho? Am I really in Morioka city? Am I really in Iwate prefecture? Am I really in Japan?

I’m borrowing Bryan, my neighbor and fellow CIR’s internet at the moment. Yes, I don’t have internet, so that’s why I haven’t been able to do anything let alone use the internet to update. I’ve written everything down since I got here, so once I have some time to write I’ll have plenty to catch up on. Actually, next week, my first real week of work, I’m going to have some free time, since Bryan and Kawamura-san, my supervisor, are going to Tokyo to get the other JETs. I have some stuff I want/have to do, like make a Japanese lesson for the new ALTs, go through some translations, look at material for the English lesson I’m teaching, etc, but I’m sure I’m going to have a bit of free time, especially since my supervisor is not really going to be there. So maybe I’ll sneak an entry in there :)

I’m not going to go into anything yet (and SO much has happened in just 7 days that I can’t quite believe it!), but let me just say that Iwate is a gorgeous place. It’s kinda rural, it’s kinda easy to forget about little old Iwate (and by little, I mean the second largest prefecture in the nation~), but the people are really kind and really open to foreigners. I mean, the name of the international center (where I will be working occasionally!) is called “Aiina” which means “Oh, Awesome!” I mean, if that doesn’t say it right there. Everybody has a lot of pride in their prefecture, and everyone works hard. I’ve been a bit stressed out because there’s no one to cover for my Japanese if I make a mistake or can’t do something, I don’t have a supervisor who can translate into English as a crutch, and I have responsibilities and obligations now. I have a real job. I have my own apartment! I have to pay bills. The only other native English speaker in my near vicinity is my coworker. I’m just feeling a little isolated.

But when I got to practice with the people in the prefectural office for the upcoming Sansa Odori, when I got to go out with them for drinks afterwards, when I got to wander around Iwate with Kawamurap-san and Bryan and Takada-san and talk in Japanese (and mostly get out what I wanted to say), when I look out at night from my own balcony from my own apartment at the mountains that aren’t that far in the distance, I remember just how right it is that I am here.