Lol Well okay…I’m exaggerating a bit. He was selected to be a model by his teacher. If you met Keith, you’d know that he doesn’t really like being the center of attention. Most of these people here have never seen a cute black guy from New York so he gets an outrageous amount of attention and people coming up to him daily asking for pictures and wanting to talk to him or kids emulating him. Not only does he deal with that on a daily basis while heading towards the studio, but all of this month, he has to sit for two hours and get stared at and drawn by everyone in the studio lol. However, it’d make a good addition to his resume, yes?
He was telling me about it and it’s pretty much how most of those art modeling sessions go: he walks in, sit and hold still for 25 minutes, take a break for 15 minutes, and continue on until the 2 hours are up. Yes… he keeps his clothes on -.-. I haven’t been there to see it in action, but he has told me quite a bit about it.
Most of the people that attend are the regulars at the studio, but we’ve never met them because they come on different days. Also, they are Japanese people who have traveled! So, that means he’s been meeting a completely different type of Japanese person. There was this guy with purple hair and he asked Keith in good English how old does he look. Keith said 40, but he actually turned out to be 70. Like, what the hell? Lol I have a feeling he asks people that all the time so he can surprise them with the answer.
There’s another lady who loves Keith’s hair and would ask him a ton of questions on how he got his hair to “do that.” Lol Eerr…nature and genetics?
He, of course, gets a lot of compliments, ranging from “beautiful boy (!!) to handsome face...err…not the ones I was expecting, but they embarrass Keith all the same lol. They also told him that they wish they could meet more black people like him in Japan. They also told him that they want him to bring me one of those days and gave us some candy out of kindness. Wow. I was ALWAYS under the impression that you cannot change the minds of Japanese people. Simply on the principle of how you’re not the first foreigner they have seen, so most Japanese people have already decided what they’ll think and feel about you before they have even met you. Terrible? Yes, however unavoidable.
Also, based on some ignorant people that I’ve met, who will continue to say negative things about non-Japanese people despite one in their face; that’s what I thought. Especially after this warm treatment, Keith could go outside and some other Japanese old lady would be scared of him because he has a foreign face. For the people willing to see the good in foreign folks (also known as, the non-ignorant, well adjusted Japanese person), it will all depend on whom they meet because these particular ladies have never met any black people before Keith. From now on, however, they’re going to be kind and sweet to the next black people they see. Trailblazing FTW!. lol
This is mainly a pictures post, so please look at the pictures!
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I’m helping out another one of my students for the same competition. This one, however, she’s practicing for a different category. I’m not too sure if her category includes awards, though. She was selected by the teachers because she’s so good at English, but she secretly told me that she didn’t want to do the speech she has. I was shocked because…ya know… it’s her speech, so how could she possibly not want to do the one she picked? Oh..right…she didn’t pick it; one of the teachers gave it to her. Sigh. This is exactly why I try and make the students pick their own speeches because I mean based on her attitude, it’s clear that she would rather do a different one. Sigh.
So, it kind of showed when I would give her the same pointers as Kenta-kun (The Rockstar Cicada) and while he absorbed it, internalized it, and show me that he’s listening by using my corrections, Chisaka-san would make the same mistakes over and over again, at the same parts of her speech. Er….okay, but I’m just going to make the same corrections, while just explaining them in different ways. When teachers talk about whether or not a student is good English that usually just means that they do their English homework very well in comparison to other students. You would have never known if you heard her complain about how difficult the speech is, even though Kenta-kun has a much harder one, in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary level. At the same time, I can understand why she is not as excited about it, simply because the speech wasn’t her choice. 
She would constantly ask me how Kenta-kun is progressing and would ask how often he comes and practices she immediately gets all competitive and always goes, “Okay! I’ll do my best!” and work that much harder. I just don’t know why she doesn’t do the speech just for her own benefit lol..but I’m not going to knock her motivation. I can safely say that she’s doing a lot better than when we first started and she’s trying to break out of the “katakana” way of speaking English. Katakana English is just Japanesing English. It essentially used to make English words easier to pronounce for Japanese people, but I mean, they should pronounce it in the way it’s supposed to be pronounced. Every other language requires that you try to sound as natural as possible, not settling for pseudo-English. For example, “I love the view from here,” in Katakana English is, “Ah-ee rabu za byuu furamu hee-ya.” That’s not English!!!
........ I think I’m going to do a class on proper consonant and vowel pronunciation. Yeah, I’ll do that when school starts again. Now, I’m well aware that there are plenty of different ways to speak English, simply because there are so many different languages in the world. HOWEVER, most of those other countries more than likely insist on sounding as natural as possible. I know that most students write words out in katakana so it’d be easier for them to pronounce, but that isn’t how it should be. Why? Well, the Japanese language doesn’t distinguish l’s from r’s and b’s from v’s. Even their way of making the v sound is “bui.” What’s that!!! You know….I’m gonna stop here since this isn’t the main focus of this entry lol.
In any case! After she got tired from using so much English, we usually end up chatting. She’s quite bright and simply adorable (like most students at MY school ☺)! I asked her about her other schoolwork and how she has been doing. She’s always complaining about things being “too difficult” or “troublesome” but she has no choice but to do it. The students here have a lot of homework to do during the break…which would make sense if they didn’t have to come to school during summertime! She and the other students have an outrageous amount of school homework. She has to do about 10 pages of Japanese, 20 pages of English, 10 pages of Biology, and about 15 pages of math problems.…kinda makes your high school summer reading list seem like fun, doesn’t it? lol
I look at all the work she has to do and she tells me, quite honestly, that she hasn’t finished it, nor does she want to….like most high school kids. I sympathized with her, but she’s well aware of the fact that she will be tested on all of those subjects in the first week when she gets back, so she NEEDS to finish that work. Then she says, “Hey sensei! Since we’re speaking Japanese and you know so much kanji (-.-), me and everyone else thought that you must be some sort of a genius. You can LITERALLY do anything right?” I immediately get suspicious, but then I realize that she ACTUALLY thinks that because then she whips out her math homework and asks me to help her!
Wait, wait, wait. My being here is SO completely unrelated to your math homework lol. Not to mention, foreigners speaking Japanese DEFINITELY doesn’t make that foreigner a genius. Also, what does my speaking Japanese have to do with any mathematical knowledge?
So, after laughing, I explain that it’s likely that I have no idea how to do her difficult math proble--- wait! I looked at the problems and realized that, after drudging up what I can remember from high school, I can actually help her! It was only multiplying binomials, quadratic equations, linear equations and multiplying fractions. Phew! I was expecting some outrageous SAT like math, but it wasn’t bad.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much math related Japanese so I had to ask her some questions before I can actually help her. Her main issue though was that she makes little mistakes so while her work is correct, the final answer would be off. Also, she didn’t really seem to understand the fundamentals of multiplication and division. As in, she would know HOW to get to an answer, but couldn’t explain it to me. Like no, 25 over 25 is NOT zero and no you can’t divide anything by zero, a negative minus a negative is still negative, and the best way to do most of those problems is to remember that you’re searching to isolate the x. I also taught her FOIL for the binomials since they don’t use that method here. Why don’t they use that! After I helped her out with math, she tried to push Biology on me and I chuckled before pointing to the door, telling her to leave because it’s 1pm during the summer and she’s at school with her uniform on!!
I tried to break things down easily for her because she refuses to see her math teacher about it. I completely understand lol. He’s a jerk. I told her that she should get a group of her friends together and do math and science in a group. It’s the easiest way to properly do your work if one of your friends knows how to do it, right? She says that she’ll try and get them together, but she doesn’t know if they’d want to meet up just to study. Okay…lol. 
I remind her that it’s summer and how she’s still in her uniform, so she needs to go home, change, and go have fun somewhere. She agreed but she didn’t have any idea of where to go. I mention the giant amusement and games place that Keith and I always go to. It’s 10 minutes by bike from our school. It’s an awesome place to play the newest arcade games or do coin pusher, crane games and pachinko. One floor is completely dedicated to bowling, since apparently it’s gotten quite popular here. It also has a pay section in which you pay 10 dollars for 3 hours of arcade games and sports like rollerblading, golf, badminton, pool, basketball, darts, fishing (!), soccer, tennis, archery and they even have a batting cage with pitching practice at the top floor. They also have a relaxation and spa section where you can change into some slippers and sit down in an expensive massage chair with the other people in that room and just watch tv. There’s also a giant kids section where there are more of those awesome massage chairs for the parents. However… her eyes widen and she quickly shakes her head and freaks out, telling me, “No! No! No! That place is way too dangerous and scary! Tatum-sensei, do you really go there?! Aren’t you bothered by the people there and do scary people come up to you?” You know?.…I’m going to just leave that alone lol.
Well…of course not in a literal sense, but I’m preparing him for a speech contest in September. There are different sections of the speech contest, his is just a recitation, but he still competes with other students in his category. When he first came to me, though, it was quite awkward. Another teacher and I decided his speech. I mean at first the silly teacher was trying to force him to pick something from “An Inconvenient Truth,” and I frowned at her so hard! -.- Like what are you doing? That’s obviously her interest; forcing him to talk fiction about the environment won’t go over well with anybody, especially the JET judges. I tried to explain that his book is only meant to scare people like her by using sensational imagery, but then she misinterprets what I was trying to get at and said, “Yeah! It’s very sensational right? I mean he was able to gather so much information!” ….sigh. Anyway…no. No, I will not let you use one of our students to spread sensational environmental fiction. Just… no.
So then whenever I asked him what he wants to speak about, he’d just cock his head to the side with his head down so I won’t be able to see his face…..okay. Wtf do you want to speak about? lol It was so frustrating for me because HE’S the one that's going to be standing there in front of all those people when that day comes, so I don’t want to force a speech on him if he doesn’t want to do it. I’m not okay with picking something that I would think he likes. I want to know what he likes. He mentions Harry Potter and how he has most of those books in English so I said great! Then I tell him to pick his favorite section of any book, take a 3 minute passage from it then bring it in. Seems easy enough right?
Next day, he comes in with a sad face and lets me know that he couldn’t find something because he gets tired when he has to read all that English. lol…what? Well I can understand what he means because I get tired of reading Japanese newspapers. So he indirectly left it up to me and the other teacher. It just felt inherently wrong that another teacher and myself made this kind of decision for him, but he didn’t say anything! Sigh. It was clear that we had no choice in the matter, so we looked for something for him to do.
Some English books here have little passages in which you’re supposed to guess what or who the speaker is based on the speech. As I was flipping through the books, I found a story of cicada that’s a flirtatious rock star. It’s simply one of the cutest things I have ever read. It’s done so perfectly well! The cicada rock star brags about how he did the underground scene for a bunch of years, how he is in an intense competition with the other chump cicadas because they have the nerve to think they are rock stars, how he’s hot and that no one sings like he can. Of course you’ve noticed this by now, my student is nothing like that rock star cicada, but that’s what is so funny about it! 
He said it was too difficult, but then I pointed out that since he’s smart, there’ll be no trouble and that I’ll help him. When he first read it out loud to me, I realized that I had to turn him into a rock star cicada for a month and a half. I didn’t know if he even wanted to go that far, but then he told me that he really wants to win. So, I taught him “rock star” hand gestures and natural movements that coincide with his speech because I warned him that just standing there and reciting what he practiced isn’t going to win the judges over. I also helped him with his confidence and helping him give off the idea that he’s the best cicada on the planet. I explained that this rock star cicada is arrogant as hell, like most human ones, and he’d need to aggressively get that point across when the day comes.
Somehow we got into a conversation about music, then I started talking about Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy and how he has the typical attitude of an arrogant rock star (without having any real talent), while the ACTUAL lead singer, Patrick Stumph, doesn’t embody a rock star at all. I mentioned it in passing, but then the next day he tells me that he really likes Fall Out Boy (!!) and he would like to hear more bands of the same genre that they are in. What the hell lol. Okay! Sweet! I think stuff like this is necessary though, to help him get into the mindset of a rock star cicada since the whole passage is written the first person view so clearly the speaker is the cicada. 
Then he asked me about accents and how singers with accents sound. I had him listen to The Klaxons and some of Corrine Bailey Rae because of how you can hear their accents when they sing. He wasn't able to pick up on it so I helped him out by pronouncing the differences in some of the words. He caught on quickly after that!
So, before I realized it, my cute student walked off with burned albums of Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco and My Chemical Romance while I’m sitting there wondering if I came on a bit too strong with the whole music thing. lol But it’s okay! He told me that it’s his favorite genre of music and it’d be “amazing” to hear it in English and it’d be good English practice for him. Oh…okay then. lol
He’s been progressing so well! It’s so obvious that he really enjoys what we’re doing and likes pretending to be a rock star cicada because he reads his lines with such confident arrogance! Lol I told him as long as he keeps his new found arrogance for the cicada, then he’ll be fine. The main problem that I’ve been helping him with is how to put emotion in his words since English isn’t spoken in a monotone, especially with a rock star cicada as well as how to pronounce certain words. I’m so glad that he’s taking this seriously; well then again of course he is because he signed up for it. 
It just makes me nervous because I know he really wants to win but we are an agricultural high school. There are a lot of academic high schools in where English is treated as serious business because most of the students in those schools are heading for college, and English knowledge is necessary for college entrance exams. So, there are students who already sound like native speakers and will have no trouble with consonants and vowels, but we can’t be pessimistic.
If he wins in his category, he gets to be in the news and that is the main reason for his hard work… just to be recognized. Well then damnit, if that’s what you want, I’ll try and make you as natural as I can! Stick with me kid, and I’ll make you into the most arrogant cicada rock star that the contest has ever seen! lol
I was lazy one Sunday and decided to wait until the afternoon to get lunch…like at around 3pm or so because I was playing some games. I usually get something small for lunch on the weekends though. I was holding it off since I should have went for lunch earlier, but whatever. As I’m walking out of my apartment, I come face to face with this random girl that I never saw before who was about to knock on my door. So I jump, startled but quickly gain my bearings and ask who she is. She told me that her name is Tomoko, she’s the daughter of my downstairs neighbor and that she was told to come upstairs by her parents because they told her that we are “ nice foreigners.” Lol Thanks, I guess.
After that however, we ended up talking for a long time in English. She started off by asking what we do in our apartments because when she was at this apartment a couple of years ago, they lived under an American guy and across from a British guy. They hated them because they were so loud and obnoxious and threw parties a lot. Ugh. She went on to say that everyone is aware that we are here, but we are so quiet. To me, it sounded like they liked the fact that they were able to hear foreigners making noise, but at the same time appreciate that we’re quiet, but can’t help but be ultra curious. I personally thought that we made too much noise because Keith and I blast our music, but I guess the paper walls seem to hold sound in alright lol. It could also be because she lives below and one door to the left so they don't hear noise. The family below us moved because the father was transferred to a different school, so we can literally be as loud as we like and no one would be able to hear. Sweet! 
We ended up sitting outside near her door and talked about a lot of things, one thing in particular about how she would really, really like to swim (?) and if there are any public pools here. Um…what? I couldn’t help but chuckle and wonder why she’s in desperate need of a pool but I don’t think I would be able to help her. So I mentioned that there are some surfers that live next to her and that if she asks them then I’m sure they would know. Like… why the hell wouldn’t they know, right? So I told her to ring the bell and she was like,”No, no, no! I can’t just go up and ring some random guy’s doorbell!” I pointed out that she did that to me no more than half an hour ago and she commented that because he’s Japanese, she would not do that. So I’m like whatever, let’s just wait and see if he’s in there, but apparently he wasn’t in because his car wasn’t there.
We continue talking for a while then his car pulls up! I tell her there he is, so….she can ask him then. She still wasn’t going to make the first move so I ask him about a pool first, THEN she decides to take it away. -.- Well, that’s how it works here I guess. He tells her that there weren’t any public pools here but just in case, he will ask someone and if we’d be kind enough to wait, he’ll go in his apartment, put down all of his stuff and come back out. So after he came back out, we all talked about pools and how there aren’t any, when another neighbor comes! I told Tomoko about her before we spoke about the pool and how she is a very wonderful woman and her daughter, Natsuho is adorable. Yuko was the first Japanese person to actually not care that we were foreign and welcomed us with open arms. She’s also been quite busy so I haven’t seen her in a while, so I’m glad I was actually able to see her. So after she had the answer of where there was an actual public pool in Miyazaki (!), it was like an impromptu neighbor “party” because there is 4 out of 6 of us in the apartment, so a decently sized group of us were chatting outside. It was nice! So, afterwards, when they had to go inside and make dinner and whatnot, Tomoko and I make plans to have lunch or just hang out in my apartment since she lives downstairs.
When we can finally get a day to hang out, we usually just chat about random things. She was telling me that her culture puts way too much pressure on her and she hates it; she’d rather leave Japan and deal with another country. Imagine my surprise when a girl who was born in Miyazaki, lived in Osaka for a while, comes back, then tells ME that Japanese people from Miyazaki are rude! If you know enough Japanese people, you realize that they are quite proud of Japan, some of them, to the point of ridiculing other cultures. So, meeting a Japanese person who would rather bash their own culture than praise it is probably something that most foreign people won’t get to experience. However, she has pretty good English because she went to college in Australia, so I don’t really have to speak Japanese, but even she gets tired of trying to figure out what she wants to say in English and she’ll switch to Japanese.
She told me that when she got back to Miyazaki, most people stare at her and are rude to her because they can tell that she’s not from here… but I’m like…you’re Japanese. It doesn’t seem to matter though. She told me about when she first arrived in Osaka, she was wandering around lost, and this Japanese girl walked up to her and asked her if she was alright. She explained that she was lost and the girl that spoke went up to her told her where to go, and gave her the number to her cell phone and told her if she needed more to call. Unbelievable! You would never know that because the people here say so much bad things about other places IN Japan. They always say to stay away from the city because there are too many people and so, way too many bike gangs and yakuza. I always sigh every time I hear that and it’s clearly a country bumpkin type thing, but I still can’t help but roll my eyes. If they say such things about other Japanese people, I can only imagine what they think about foreigners.
She also told me that her boss has a kid but he’s always inviting her to drink like three times a week. That’s unfortunately, quite common. I know so many of these teachers drink every night. I asked one of the English teachers (the one that doesn’t like to team teach with my lesson plans) what does he like to drink, and his response was, “…night time or day time?” What!? Wow. 
A different English teacher told me that he drinks every night to “train” himself and build up a tolerance to alcohol. Right. A couple of other Japanese people told me that they drink and smoke because they are very stressed and it’s the only way to calm them down. I can understand that, but you guys….ya know…have children to take care of. When I say that they drink, I mean that they go out with coworkers to drink after spending WAY too much time at work. It’s kind of like… go home guys! Not to mention: they drink and smoke NEAR their children (way too common here), and one jerk even had the nerve to bring her newborn baby to a smoke room! –holds back expletive-
In any case, hearing this Japanese girl talk negatively about her culture isn’t new. In the span of about 8 days, Keith and I have met random ladies who bash their own culture. This one lady, in broken English, said, “My foreign friends and foreign people…open. Japanese people…closed.” I didn’t even ask her what she thought about Japanese culture, but foreign-friendly Japanese people seem as if they can’t wait to complain about the culture that they are living in. I’ll get into more reasons that I was told in a different post, but from a foreigner’s angle, all one might see is the surface pride of their culture. Knowing enough Japanese people however, you’re bound to hear complaints…even without knowing a lick of Japanese.