At a diner by the beach…
I sat in a corner with a Japanese co-worker. I needed to talk to someone after a hard day at work. The two of us have gotten very close lately, mostly because of my emotional instability as of late, and she started telling me about some pretty intense problems she’s been having. I told her that I want to help her, and that I can always listen to her, but it would be hard for me to give her good advice because we have a language barrier, a cultural barrier, and a generation gap between us. “At least,” I commented, “I hope that you have Japanese friends whom you can talk to honestly about this”. She gave me a strange look and said: “no, no one, I can’t”. I tried to explain my belief that secrets weigh a person down, but it was of no use. “No one talks about such things here.” I keep forgetting that honest communication is very much not ‘the Japanese way’. Though the people here are often packed together in narrow streets, crowded stores, small living spaces and rush-hour trains, I wonder if they might get lonely sometimes.
sleepiness and skates…
I am feeling seriously overworked. Especially since I’ve been asked to substitute for another teacher a lot lately with no extra pay. On Thursday I had an hour break after driving from one classroom to another and I accidentally fell deeply asleep on the floor until my students’ parents knocked on the door and woke me up. I have funny ways of rebelling against the system though. Like yesterday I was teaching a lesson to two kids, and it vaguely involved sentences such as “do you know how to rollerskate?” So, I decided to bring in my rollerblades and have each of my 10-year-old students try them on and skate around the classroom. Then the classroom wasn’t big enough so we had to turn the halls of the building into mini skating rinks. Just when I thought my teaching style couldn’t get more eccentric…
~me~ at 10:32 AM
The funny thing is…
That I thought that I’d have more time to update my blog while I was away from my homestay. I left my homestay because I was tired, but I’ve come back exhausted due to heavy partying in the absence of House Rules. So I spent the past two weeks at a teachers’ residence, where I happily drank orange juice out of the carton, sat at the table improperly, drank copious amounts of beer, played vulgar drinking games, burped, and left my underwear all around my room. But I also missed Aoi fiercely, so now I am back at home in this cult of rules. I admit that all these Japanese rules about dressing, eating, acting etc. still don’t make sense to me because I wasn’t brought up in this culture, but at the same time I believe that all people cling to norms and old-fashioned values for a sense of stability in an otherwise chaotic environment. I can identify with chaos well enough, which ironically brings me much closer to understanding the orderliness of Japanese society.
Later
~me~ at 5:36 AM