I was teaching a conversation involving the sentences: "what is your phone number?" and "my phone number is..." to my english class today, when some of my more enthusiastic students pulled out their cellular phones to act out the dialogue. The rest of the class quickly followed suit and soon I was staring at a classroom full of colorful phones decorated with sparkly stickers and decals of cartoon characters.
If you're wondering about the stickers, it's because this is a second grade class.
Ok, ok, information age and all, but 8-year-olds?? Well to a degree, cellular phones are just more necessary in Japan. Like, I can't seem to meet my friend at a busy train station in Tokyo without constant communiaction on our cell phones; this is due to the vastness of the place and the unbelievable crowds. Japanese cell phones are also more fun than those at home. That is to say that they have large screens (yet easily fit in your pocket), take pictures, easily send and receive email and cmail (cmail is sent from one cell phone to another), browse the internet, organize your schedule, and do karaoke.
The one issue I take with these advanced devices is that they, be it extremely paradoxically, are conducive to less interaction with people sometimes. Like for example, I was at a friend's house for dinner recently and the friend had invited over her boyfriend and his roomate as well. Neither the boyfriend nor his companion could speak English very well, so to avoid the effort they played with their cell phones all night. The two must have emailed and cmailed everyone the knew that night judging from the amount of time they spent glued to those devices. It is almost commonplace here to begin fiddling with your cell phone if you feel the slightest bit awkward in a social situation. Now that there is cell phone to cell phone email, i get "cmails" from my acquaintences far more often than actual phone calls. Could it be that as a direct result of communication technology, people are actually communcating less and less?
~me~ at 5:07 AM
Well at least I am not bored. Being a foreigner in Japan, otherwise mundane experiences take on an adventurous quality. Take today: The Drug Store. Yes, the drug store is the place where, due to unfamiliar brands and an indecipherably complex writing system, I almost blindly stroll the isles looking for what I need. My last drug-store-related mishap involved the purchase of saline solution made for hard contact lenses instead of soft ones (who the hell still wears hard contact lenses?). In a word: OUCH! My eyes burned for about a day. So today, with that behind me, I set out to walk the isles pretending to know where I was going and evaluate products I was familiar with. Bear in mind that all the while everyone in the store is aware of my cluelessness due to my not being Japanese. Maybe one day I will swallow my pride (or anxiety over speaking Japanese to strangers) and ask for help. Well anyway, I think that I’ve returned home bearing shampoo. I’ll let you know.
Here begins my blog.
~me~ at 5:21 AM