Final Report

I had been asked by Shinpei Ishii, a former Amherst House resident, to write an article for the DAC (Doshisha Amherst Club) News by the end of month, and just finished with 20 minutes to spare.

Since my official duties as the Fellow are effectively over, I decided to use this as an opportunity to write a kind of final report on my experience as the Fellow, since it seems like a waste that the only report the fellow usually writes is in the form of a “Mid-Year Report” written about a month after the Fellow starts. I’m including it below.

There is much that I still need to catch up on from the past week, but I’ll leave that until I’ve had a bit of a sleep, since I’ve watched the last two sunrises from the top of Mt. Fuji and outside a club in Shibuya, respectively. More on that tomorrow.

After the Amherst House:
How I enjoyed a year of great change as the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow

Last week, I did my last batch of grading and submitted the final grades for the students of my English class, thus officially ending my responsibilities as the 2007-2008 Amherst-Doshisha Fellow. However, while I learned a lot about teaching and about myself from doing so, what really made the Fellowship special for me was the time and the opportunities it gave me to develop and nurture special relationships and explore myself.

Looking back, it seems that my time as the Fellow can be divided into three fairly distinct periods:

Life with Sawa and the ryosei:
From the time I arrived in September until the end-of-year dorm trip, I got to spend a great deal of time adjusting to a new life in Kyoto, spending a lot of time with my new dorm-mates and my then-fiancee, now wife (!) Sawa. (Because I was living in the Friend Peace House with three other male ryosei (dorm-mates), Sawa found her own apartment a couple of blocks away, but it was more like we had two houses to live in together.) I remember having a lot of frustration at the time, with things like how limited my ability to communicate was in Japanese, late nights grading and preparing classes, and being dissatisfied with the choir I joined, but that was greatly outweighed by how much fun it was to explore Kyoto and get to know the ryosei. Even now, I can’t believe it was only a couple of months, because I have so many wonderful memories of all the temples, shops and special places Sawa and I explored, biking through the back streets of Kyoto, and all the wonderful French toast breakfasts, all-night karaoke sessions, midnight climbs up Mt. Daimonji, late-night bike expeditions to sento (public baths) followed by hearty steaming bowls of ramen, and even slumber parties complete with hide-and-seek, that we shared with the ryosei.

On my own:
After our end-of-year dorm trip, Sawa and I headed up to Yokohama to spend New Year’s with her family, which ended up morphing into a 3-month period during which Sawa started a job that kept her based at home in Yokohama, I entered into the two-month winter holiday and had a lot of time on my own to travel and work on my own projects, while the ryosei were often out and about themselves. During this period, I discovered the joys of the ¥650 teishoku restaurant “Bimota”, with its awesome owner and single, but ever-changing daily special. I got into a very productive schedule of studying Japanese, practicing the Japanese traditional music I was learning (shamisen, koto, and utai singing), exploring my new passions of geography and the meaning of music, and planning our wedding. In between these bouts of productivity, I went and collected fresh water from the well at Nashinoki Shrine each morning, had copious home-made latte breaks, and munched on my own trademark miso-butter toast and delicious dinners at Bimota.

When I wasn’t in one of these routines, I was off exploring various parts of Japan: Fukuoka with one of the ryosei and an Amherst House alum, the Sapporo Snow Festival with Sawa, and praying and playing with my friend Kimura-san and the crazy musical monk in Kumano. The climax of my travelling period was my two-week solo trip to China, where I visited old friends from Amherst and New Zealand for the first week and then explored on my own for the second.

Although it was a little lonely, having this time to find out what I really wanted to do if given the chance to do whatever I want was one of the most unique benefits of the Fellowship. Many people spend most of their lives being forced to do what needs to be done and not necessarily what they want to do, but I had the luxury of being free to explore my own passions. Through this, I found that I really love learning and missed the intellectual community I had at Amherst, which made me certain that I wanted to become a professor, as I had been contemplating.

Family and friends:
From the end of March, things changed drastically again, as half of the remaining former Amherst House residents graduated, I started teaching spring semester classes, and Sawa and I embarked on a period of frenzied social organizing, centred on our wedding in Kyoto in April and the reception we held back in Amherst for friends and family there who couldn’t make it, timed to coincide with the Amherst Commencement/Reunion period. Before, during and after these two events, there was suddenly a huge influx of friends and family, so that most of our time from the end of March until the end of July ended up being spent either preparing for one of these, making them happen, or catching up on the things we fell behind on while they were going on. In between, I also made an effort to take part in and organize inter-dorm activities with the other two dorms next door, like movie nights, barbecues, dessert parties and more inter-dorm trips.

This period, too, was very fun and rewarding in its own way. The wedding was such a wonderful experience, and it was so nice not to have the wedding planning be on top of a full-time job. We were both overjoyed to get the chance to go back and celebrate the happy occasion in Amherst with all our old friends and family. It was also a rare luxury to be able to spend as much as two weeks straight focusing almost solely on spending time with family or friends who came to visit, showing them the wonderful things, places and people I’d found in Japan and exploring the ones I hadn’t together. At times, especially after a whole bunch of friends came in a row, I would feel like I wanted a little more time to my own, but didn’t have the excuse of having to work. At these times, I think I got a little taste of what it would be like to be a wealthy aristocrat-type person, and could see how quickly a life of leisure can start to seem like a chore when you have to organize trips and dinners and entertainment and weddings all the time. However, it was still always great to spend a lot of quality time with friends and family and I know I’ll be especially glad later on as life gets too hectic that I used this time to enjoy being with people who I care about.

Looking back:
As I look back on the whole year, overall, I’m mostly just so grateful to have had this unique opportunity to enjoy living with wonderful people in this wonderful new country. Each phase of my time here was very rewarding in its own way, and I’m glad I got to taste a little bit of each – spending time with new and old family and friends, with even a little time just to be on my own. I don’t regret any of the time I spent on each. In some ways, I wish I could have been more consistent in studying my Japanese and gotten involved in more Japanese musical groups, but I think those are things that I can always work on more later after the Fellowship.

The one thing I really do miss is the time I spent in those first few months with the ryosei, because it’s the one thing I know I won’t be able to have again. After some of the ryosei graduated in March, life with only the last couple of ryosei wasn’t quite the same as the special community we had before. Since Doshisha forced the Amherst House residents out last spring and moved the Fellow and a few remaining residents into the Friend Peace House, that special connection that has continued between the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow and the Amherst House students through the decades has been stretched almost to its limit. It’s fun creating a new community with the residents of the nearby Richards House and Hawaii House, but it somehow wasn’t quite the same. It makes me very glad I was able to make the most of those special first few months back when I first arrived, but sad to think how much more fun it might have been if I could have stayed in the Amherst House alongside all 15 or 16 Japanese students as the other Fellows once did. Most of all, I worry that if Doshisha doesn’t let us rebuild a new Amherst-Doshisha community in the new Friend Peace House, I may be one of the last Fellows to know what a precious opportunity the Fellowship has been.

Photos

Here are the photos I promised last time from the Gion Festival and from me and Jiiko’s birthday:

Oh, and finally here’s a photo from the nomikai with my students last weekend after our last class:

Finishing teaching, off on my trip

Once again, I’ve been too busy to update. During the last 5 days I:
-had my Demachiya English class’s final presentation (by the way, they ended up paying me the full ¥50,000, not just the ¥25,000 I had feared. They’ve also offered to have me back next semester, and I think it will be a good addition to whatever more Japanese-involving job I get. One hour of teaching that earns me about as much as 6 or 7 hours of working some random minimum-wage job!)
-went out for dinner with my students
-got to spend just a couple of hours with Sawa’s mum while she was here in between all these things, where the two Matsueda women helped me pick out some new clothes, spurred by the fact that I was planning to make it through the summer with my one pair of shorts, which incidentally has a giant hole in the right pocket. I think if it weren’t for them or my own parents I would never buy any new clothes.
-went on a daytrip to a campground in Kuta with a another 8 or 9 Full House residents
-had my final basketball practice
-chatted with my Dad and three old Zumbyes on Skype
-finally decided to cancel me and Mike Kohl’s plan to tour Japan
-booked our trip to Mt. Fuji for next Tuesday
-had a shamisen lesson
-graded all my students’ final projects and handed back their final grades and comments
-called the NZ embassy and figured out the steps we need to take to sort out Sawa’s visa.
-wrote letters of recommendation for two students applying for the Nijima Scholarship (after Morita-sensei and I convinced Doshisha to advertise again for submissions while more clearly explaining the English test requirements).
-packed for the upcoming trip to: see my brother in Wakayama, go to Hakone with my mum and Sawa’s family, climb Mt. Fuji with my mum, my brother and Oli, hang out in Yokohama with Sawa’s family and then go to the Nebuta Matsuri way up in the north of Honshu.

As seems to always be the case, I am now catching up on all of this on the train, this one to Wakayama to hang out with my brother.

There’s been too much happening to recap everything, so I’ll just put up some cool photos and talk about a couple of cool/interesting things (to me anyway).

At this point, I’ve essentially just finished all of my formal obligations as the Fellow. I feel pretty good about the way I taught the class this time, and I feel like they started to get the idea of participating and in some of their final projects they actually did a really good job of writing interesting essays with good thesis statements and good use of specific examples to back up their argument. Of course, many of them still sucked, but I feel that even if just a few students get it, that’s a good thing. One student wrote this heartwarming little note at the end of her project:

Of course, she was probably just trying to grease me up for good grades, but it still made me feel great!

Incidentally, I largely followed up on my threat to fail students who didn’t start participating more in class. I ended up failing I think 9 students out of the 33. This semester writing down my policy at first and giving them especially harsh mid-term grades made me feel fine about following up with failures, and I think that’s an important lesson I’ll need to remember for future classes.

One thing I think I should have focused on more is pronunciation. I tried to work on it in our little games and told them to practice it for their final presentation, but I obviously needed to have a more explicit system of testing and grading their pronunciation, because no one really seemed to practice or improve much. For example, instead of telling them to memorize and practice the pronunciation of their final pronunciation (which made the few who actually put in preparation focus solely on memorization), I could have had a separate time where I gave them all a few sample sentences with difficult pronunciation, had them practice it and graded them all on their ability to pronounce them.

Also, in my English class, a similar thing focusing on them one by one might be good. Also, in the final class I had them play 20 questions and Celebrity, and those were great fun and good for them practicing English. Especially since I never know who will turn up on a given week, next semester I think it would be better to just play different games using English and not try to build much from lesson to lesson.

The dorm trip on Sunday was really a lot of fun.

We just happened to time it on the hottest day of the summer so far, so instead of roasting in Kyoto, we were up in the gorgeous mountains, jumping off of rocks and rope swings into the cool river, enjoying the non-humid but hot mountain air and hanging out in the shade at the campground while we had our lunch. It was a real blast, and much more the kind of trip that I liked than many other trips I’ve been on in Japan. It seems to me that when Japanese go on trips, they focus on seeing THE sights of a place and doing THE things you’re supposed to do there, which is great and all, but I prefer the idea of just going somewhere cool and kind of hanging around, goofing off and enjoying the situation, rather than feeling pressured to tick off all the sights to be seen and getting the obligatory pictures at each one.

Unfortunately, although I got heaps of photos of us jumping off rocks, they were all in multi-burst mode and I can’t figure out how to upload them properly, so this will have to suffice for now:

At the end of the trip, we had a ridiculous mad 25-minute dash with all this heavy equipment across this narrow mountain road to catch the bus, which we only just caught because Hayao had run on ahead and just barely managed to hold it for the last minute as we panted up the hill. This was also the last bus of the day. I still can’t believe we made it. I really enjoy those kinds of experiences though, they’re always so much more fun in retrospect than just a smooth trip that goes without a hitch.

One thing that I’m very glad to have decided on firmly now is to put me and Mike Kohl’s Japan trip idea on hold. I kept on vacillating back and forth on it for weeks, and I still feel really bad that I couldn’t commit to making it happen, but I think that realistically, trying to do it would put too much stress on me and Sawa’s final time in Japan and compromise my ability to complete a couple of things that are very important to me: ensuring me and Sawa get things set up for going to New Zealand, that we make the most of the time with her family before we go, and that I am able to use the last few months in Japan to really focus on my Japanese and pass this Japanese Proficiency Test. I really regret not being able to do the trip with Mike, but I think I would regret it more if I tried to push it, and I also want to make sure we do something along the same lines together in the future, whether in Japan or California or New Zealand or wherever.

Also, lately you might have noticed I haven’t been rambling on as much about my ideas about music and grad school in Canada. Partly it’s because I haven’t had any time to think or research about that, but also I’ve been thinking more and more about another possibility involving studying Japanese music at the graduate school of the Tokyo University of the Arts. Essentially, there’s a little bit of a trade-off between my work and family, but in the future rather than the present. What I am most excited about for my own career – this idea of studying music comparatively – and what would be the best for my future family – having some kind of professional specialty in Japan to allow me to potentially work in and out of Japan (not to mention forcing me to get my Japanese to the level where I could do academic work in Japan). It would be a shame to miss out on the opportunity to do the research with the Canadian guy, but I think in the long term it might be more important to have this Japan connection. Hopefully maybe after that’s done a spot in this guy’s lab might open up, or whatever. There are many different possibilities for the future. But anyway, I’m starting to lean towards this idea. If I can get it, the Japanese Ministry of Education offers scholarships for foreign students to come study there, which would be a really sweet deal. Maybe if I did that, me and Mike Kohl might get another chance to retry our Japan tour idea, and that time I’d have all the connections involved with going to the top music school in Japan!

OK, so that’s some of the most important happenings of late. To finish, I wanted to put in some of Sawa’s photos from the Gion Matsuri and from last month when we celebrated me and Jiiko’s birthday in the usual way – smearing cake all over each other’s faces. However, I don’t have time to upload any photos right now, so I’m just going to upload the text only and try to update the photos next chance I get.

Gion Matsuri and last class

16/7:
On Wednesday I had my final Noh lesson ever. Actually, I didn’t have a lesson, I just explained to my teacher that I was going away and at the end of my Fellowship and had to stop, and gave her a bottle of NZ wine as a thank-you present. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to understand what I meant so it took a long time till I finally made it clear. I felt kind of bad about springing it on her at short notice, but I think it would have been just as awkward no matter when I did it. I’m very glad I learned a bit about Noh, but I do feel at this point I could do other things that will be more beneficial to my learning.

After that, I went to do 3 hours of helping out at the shop whose float I would be pulling the next day. As cool as it was to pull the float in the parade, I was ever so slightly miffed when I learned that many Japanese students actually get paid to do it, while I not only did it for free but also did those 3 hours of selling entry tickets for free as well. It was certainly worth it for me, but of course it’s always nice to get money.

Here’s a photo from when this group of monks came by and did some kind of prayers for the shop.

During that job I got to speak in polite Japanese as I’ve been hoping to do in whatever job I eventually get after the Fellowship. It waas fun, but saying the same phrases over and over did get a little tiresome even after just 3 hours, so it would be nice to get a job where I actually have to say many different things in Japanese, not just the same things over and over.

After grabbing a quick meal at Bimota for the first time in over a week (!), Sawa and I went to a saxophone concert by Yasuaki Shimizu and his Saxophonettes, where we were meeting Sawa’s former dentist and family friend. It was a pretty random concert that I never would have gone to on my own, but I must say it was really cool. It was fairly avante-garde and there were lots of very strange progressive musical things going on, many of which I didn’t enjoy that much. However, some of the things he tried were actually really cool, and even the things that I didn’t like so much still had their own kind of charm, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for most avante-garde art.

After that I quickly changed into my jinbei, grabbed my shamisen and hopped on my bike to meet my brother, Oli and the Full House members who had just finished strolling through the Gion Festival and had made their way to the Kamogawa river to hang out and let off fireworks. While there, we took some cool photos, let off some fireworks, had some beers, and then ran into Kimura-san and his crew of crazy hippie drummer/dancers who were busting out their styles in front of a big crowd down by the river.

I had hoped to catch them before they left, which was one reason I brought my shamisen. Unfortunately, it turned out that the delicate sound of the shamisen was completely drowned out by the pounding of the djambe, but I still played along anyway, and when Kimura-san traded me his sanshin for a few minutes I was able to be heard a little bit.

17/7:
After getting back at around 2:30am, I had to get up at 7am the next morning to go pull a 10-tonne cart around the city in the beating sun all day. It was pretty sweet, although not exactly like I had been imagining it.

Here’s me and my crew of fellow float-pullers:

I had to write a short article about my impressions, so in lieu of repeating myself in my blog I’ll jus reproduce that here:

“I have two words of advice for any one planning to participate in the Gion Matsuri: wear sunscreen. Especially on your feet. Also, if at all possible, avoid having said feet be large enough to cause your entire heel to extend beyond the bottom of the traditional sandals and onto the burning hot pavement as you walk around the city for 6 hours.

Apart from those minor inconveniences, though, the Gion Matsuri was an amazing experience, although not quite in the way I had expected. From reading the descriptions of past participants on Doshisha’s web site and allowing my over-excited imagination to run away with itself, I had this image in my mind of being enveloped in a cocoon of camaraderie with the other 40 pullers of the Minami Kannon Yama as we ran along tugging mightily at our float, collapsing at the end in an exhausted but satisfied pool of sweat and brotherhood. It was true that there were times when the pulling was a bit of a strain, and it was cool getting to meet some of the other exchange students and Japanese locals pulling the float along, but to be honest the most exhausting thing was just being out walking in the beating sun for such a long time with a lot of standing around waiting in between bouts of pulling, and after a few hours I had had my fill of small talk.

Many of the past accounts also mentioned how they felt that the experience allowed them to feel their connection with the Kyoto of years gone by, but to me the most important part of the Gion Matsuri seems to lie not in preserving the past but in strengthening the present. The ridiculous ritual of pulling giant unwieldy floats in a huge circle through the city seems to have very little, if any, of whatever religious meaning it once had; it’s just an excuse to bring the community out into the streets and for them to bond together (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that community-building aspect of it was the real driving force even back in 869 when it first began). To be able to experience that from within, to hear the shouts of school children as they cheered us on from their classroom window or see the blissful, toothless smile of an old woman as she and her family cheered us down the home stretch from the second floor of their traditional machiya house, was a unique and powerful experience that I will never forget. Not only did I get to see the Kyoto community grow closer to one another, but by helping in this ancient but vibrant ritual, I felt welcomed into that community as one of their own. 俺は京都人や！”

(Here’s a photo of my foot immediately after the festival ended and I unwrapped the tape that had been protecting my foot from the sandals, and also the sun, providing a nice before and after contrasting effect for my ski colour)

Exhausted and sunburnt after the festival, I just wanted to lie down, but Kel and I had to pound out a coupel of batches of our famous chocolate-chip cookies – some for him to take to his final classes and host family in Wakayama, and some for me to take to my final class. (And or course, some to eat ourselves and share with the dorm people). Incidentally, there’s no overn in the dorm, so we had to cook them in Sawa’s microwave oven one very small batch at a time. However, I perfected the technique of making tiny tiny cookies to get the maximum number of cookies out of each batch.

Kelly and Mum had both been in town for the festival, but my Mum had to go back pretty soon after the festival to get ready for her research trip to Kyushu, and after baking a couple of batches Kel had to catch the train back to Wakayama. Then, after a delicious dinner with Sawa and Oli at Katsu Katsu Ton Ton, eating a batch of fresh cookies and getting a DVD of Zumbyes videos ready to show my final class, I went to sleep.

18/7:
Today was my last class, and my last day at the Kyo-tanabe campus in general, unless I come visit one of Chris’s classes sometime. It was kind of sad, and also just kind of unreal thinking that my entire year as the Fellow was essentially coming to an end. Here’s the final photo I took with Omata-san and Mizuno-san from the Kyo-tanabe English club:

In class, I had them all present the papers they wrote and I corrected/commented on. Theoretically, they corrected/rewrote them, then practicd presenting them until they had the pronunciation good and the speech from memory. In practice, only a few of them had it from memory, and for those few there pronunciation was if anything worse than the others. In retrospect, I wish I had made more of a point of them practicing their pronunciation and not worried about the memory thing, but oh well.
I had underestimated how long their speeches would take, so all we had time for in the class was to go through each one (I had to cut them off at 2.5 minutes too), and I just snuck in a brief clip of the Zumbyes singing “Thriller” at the very end. I wish I had maybe had a little more decompression time at the end, but all in all I was happy with this class as a whole. I still have to grade their papers and give them their final exams, but I feel like I conveyed the important things I wanted to, like having them participate in class, backing up abstract points with examples, and writing and thinking meaningful, interesting things instead of just bullshitting.

Last dorm meeting

After my late night grading on Sunday, I woke up late on Monday and went to meet Uneno-san, the guy who hooked me up with the opportunity to participate in the Gion Festival. I don’t know why they are so anal about it, but he insisted on takng 5 of us in person down to the location we have to meet on Thursday morning, rather than just showing us on a map or something. It was a bit of a waste of time, but that’s OK. When I got back, I went and got Oli set up with a cell-phone (they wouldn’t sell it to him the other day since he’s only here as a tourist, so I had to pretend I was getting one for myself), then I studied some Japanese and practiced my koto and shamisen, then before I knew it was time for basketball practice. It was my last practice of the semester, and potentially ever, but unfortunately not as many people came and it wasn’t quite as fun as Sunday. When I got back Oli had made us a delicious dinner, and then after a game of online chess I crashed.

Unfortunately, despite going to sleep around 12:30 and wanting to get up early and get stuff done, it was all hot and I ended up not fully getting to sleep until 3am. So, once again, I woke up late and didn’t get around to studying Japanese or practicing music until around 2pm after having coffee and chatting with Mashu, who randomly popped in because she was in Kyoto for her work.

Later on that evening, my brother and his host family were in Kyoto for the Gion Festival, and my mum came out and we all had dinner together (with Sawa and Oli), and had a nice old time.

After doing my study stuff and getting some laundry done, but before dinner, I had a little bit of time to try to plan out my life. I’ve been worried lately about how I’m gonna find work when I’ve got a bunch of plans to go traveling around for the next few weeks, then hang out with my brother, and then head off again on our honeymoon in September. However, after talking with Sawa, we decided it doesn’t make sense to try to stress about getting part-time work before we go on the honeymoon, since there’s not enough time, so in that time I’ll just look around at options and make sure I’m on top of grad school application things and NZ visa things. Possibly I might try working as a host during the two or three weeks I have free before the honeymoon, which will give me a brief chance to do it, but then give me an excuse to leave after a couple of weeks if it doesn’t work out. Either way, Sawa can support me as needed then and I can work harder later on to make up.

Also, I realized that, since I”ll be going away soon and I’m feeling pretty done with my Noh lessons, and also since last week we just finished a Noh play, so really now is the best time to bring my lessons to an end. I think I’ll bring my Noh teacher a present tomorrow and try to explain that, and hope she’s OK with it. Meanwhile, I’ll keep working on my koto and shamisen up to the concert on August 17th, then I think I’ll give up on the koto for the time being, maybe take a break on the shamisen until after the honeymoon, and just use that time to focus on the planning I need to do. After that, though, I would like to keep studying the shamisen if I can afford it.

Also, today we had our last dorm meeting. Everything’s really kind of winding to a close, which is a little sad. However, I think it’ll be interesting to start having to work and things like that, although I know once I do I’ll wish I had all this free time again.

Sunday grading

After I wrote my blog the other night, I finally operated on a strange hankering I’d been having for a little while to play chess again. I signed up for the free online chess club. It was very fun, although a little frustrating to see how much worse I was than I used to be. Unfortunately, it was also kind of addictive, so I might regret my decision later. I don’t think so, though.

Yesterday we slept nice and late, then me and Oli got some water, lunch and bouht him a second-hand bike. After some coffee and mamemochi and a little shamisen practice, it was already time for me to go to basketball. After a couple of hours of fun intense and unfortunately very humid basketball, I had the wonderful situation of coming home after some fun exercise to a delicious meal cooked by my wife waiting for me, followed by a nice hot bath. Oh yeah.

Unfortunately, the rest of the night was not quite as perfect, as I had to finish correcting my students’ essays so that I could have someone take them in to Kyo-tanabe campus first thing in the morning so my students would have time to correct them before their final presentation on Friday. The 3 or 4 hours it took reminded me how much better it was in general to focus on oral presentations this semester, which is much less work for me. Some of them were actually OK to mark, but the ones that really made it a chore were the couple where I had almost no idea what they were trying to see, but from what I could tell whatever it was it was not very good. However, it was pleasing to see that my emphasis on interesting ideas and supporting abstract ideas with specific examples seemed to have worked and many of the students did a much better job writing interesting essays than I had really expected.

Noh and stuff

Yesterday I taught my second-to-last class, which was in essence the last class I had to prepare much for, since the final class will be almost entirely my students presenting their final project. Sawa and I did a repeat of our Amherst presentation from Thursday, and it went well – better in some ways, worse in others. It seemed a little off-topic in my class, which was all focused on learning English through movies and music, while in the Amherst class it was totally in line with what they’d been learning. However, in my class, I’d prepared my students for the idea of participating in class and everything, so they were much better abou participating in the discussion.

When we got back, Sawa and Oli and I had a nice but somewhat expensive meal at Yoshikura just down the road, and then Ranbo, Hayao and I had a kind of mini-dorm meeting. Ranbo and I had been a little uncomfortable about the fact that this girl Akina wanted to come live with us and for whatever reason, Hayao kind of pushed through the idea of her coming to live with us. Ranbo and I were both not too thrilled, but we didn’t really have much we could say and Hayao was strangely passive-aggressive about the issue. I got a little uncomfortable lately though with Akina seeming like she wanted to come in and dictate where she would stay and stuff, so we wanted to at least make sure we decided what the conditions would be, like where everyone would stay, what, if anything people would pay towards the internet and daily items and such. Ranbo and I are still a little unsure if it’s a good idea to let her come and stay, but at this point it’s too late to rescind our offer, so we’ll just have to hope things work out OK.

Today, Oli and I went to this play with two free tickets my Noh teacher gave me. Like last time, it was fairly boring, although it was a little more interesting now that I’ve been learning it myself for a while. There were a couple of parts that were very intriguing, like when, after about an hour and a half of fairly boring Noh, this little kid’s voice started singing and Oli and I thought “where the hell is that coming from?” It turned out, this little 6 or 7-year-old kid had been hiding silently inside this little on-stage prop the whole time in this cumbersome costume, just to bust out this role for the last 5 or 10 minutes of the play! Also, in the last play, they suddenly started getting all hardcore and this demon appeared and started jumping around and swinging a sword in a much more exciting manner than the excruciatingly slow dancing earlier, which was kind of exciting. For much of the time, though, I worked on my own JLPT Level 1 pracice exam. I ended up getting about 55%, whereas I need 70% to pass. However, it’s multiple choice with four options, so really the minimum possible score is about 25% so it would be more accurate to say I got 20/75 = ~27%, while I need 35/70 = 50% to pass, so I’m about halfway there. I did pretty well at the reading comprehension, and it was mostly the kanji and the idiosyncratic grammar constructions I need to study, but fortunately those are the kinds of things that you can mostly study for mostly by quantity without needing a good overall system.

After the Noh play I went straight to this basketball uchiage (end-of-season “send-off” party), which was god fun. Now, I’m quite looking forward to the idea of having a nice, unscheduled morning and afternoon tomorrow, with only some basketball and cooking in the evening!

Delicious food nights, guest lecturing

The last two days there’s been lots of good food and company. On Tuesday I went to my shamisen lesson, then studied a little Japanese and then made dinner with Oli, my first time making dinner at Sawa’s place in probably 4 or 5 months! It tasted frigging great, if I do say so myself.

I also went with Ranbo after dinner to get my hair cut– only the second time I’ve cut it since I came to Japan, the first being just before the wedding!

On Wednesday, I woke up at 7am to go to Doshisha Elementary for the first time in 2008. I played around in class with them, where we did stuff related to the Tanabata Festival that was on July 7th – singing songs, doing plays, making wish things to hang on bamboo branches. It was good to go again, but it also made me feel like I wasn’t too sad I stopped going at the end of last year.

I went straight to my noh lesson from there, then practiced a little shamisen and studied some Japanese. Oh yeah, after our haircut Ranbo wanted to go to a bookstore, but actually it was me who ended up buying a book. I bought a book of practice problems for the Level 1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which I’m planning to take in December. I decided before I start really studying towards the test, I’d take a practice test cold and see how I do. I’m about halfway through right now. I haven’t checked my answers yet, but I think I’m doing pretty bad. It’s really tricky. However, I feel like I can do it if I just start studying hard and consistently, and it’ll be a good motivation, especially since I haven’t been studying very regularly since about March. Also, if I start working in places where I need to use Japanese, I think that’ll force me to improve my Japanese in new ways. It feels good to have a concrete goal to aim for.

That night we had a dessert party, where a bunch of people made sweets and stuff and Sawa and I made maccha lattes and lattes for everyone.

It was a great success, and after we’d all had our fill we started playing some fun games, cards, and then me and Sawa taught them our favourite party game, Celebrity, which everyone loved. Unfortunately, it could only be done in Japanese, and I felt bad because Oli couldn’t play, but everyone had a good time and he seemed to get along pretty well with everyone until then. Everyone was very intrigued by him being a professional poker player and so we’re going to have a poker night sometime soon.

We had some interesting batsu geemu (punishments) for our little games. For one of them, you had to write letters with your ass in front of anyone. Here’s Sawa and Micchan doing this “oshiriji”.

Finally, today (Thursday) we all (me Sawa and Oli) went to the English club, I had my English conversation hour and me and Sawa went to co-teach in Morita-sensei’s class. We ended up running out of time and not getting to cover a lot of stuff we wanted to, but that was to be expected. Importantly, we definitely conveyed the important things we wanted to, which was mostly about teaching the class the way classes are at Amherst, getting the students to participate and have fun, and they seemed to get that. It was fun, and it was nice to feel that I’ve really learned a lot about teaching from having to run my own class. After seeing the general style of the older classes, where the students just kind of sleep and text and stare blankly while someone lectures, it felt great to have them be engaged. (Incidentally, we got ¥10,000 each for teaching it!)

Later on in the evening Reiko, her new husband came to the dorm and a bunch of us had a shichirin (barbecue?) party thing. It was delicious and a great summer-y feeling, sitting on the veranda, drinking beer, eating delicious food cooked over a charcoal grill.

Tomorrow, Sawa and I are going to basically repeat today’s class for my own English class, although modifying it a little since I’ve already got them a little bit used to the Amhers style of teaching. We’ll try to build from that and push them a little further. After that, there’s only one more week, and they’ll just be presenting their final project, so tomorrow’ll be my last full day of teaching as the Doshisha Fellow!

Come to think of it, once that job is over, my official role as the Fellow is pretty much over. On top of that, since I’ve overspent my projected budget a little, I’ll have essentially finished all the privileges and responsibilities of the Fellowship by then…

The other day one of the guys from the DAC (Doshisha Amherst Club) asked me to write an article for their DAC Newsletter about being the Fellow by the end of July. I think that could be a good opportunity to write a sort of “final report” about my thoughts on the Fellowship and then after that effectively decide that my time as the “Fellow” is basically over and start looking for part-time work, etc.

Last machiya class, Oli arrives

Fortunately, Kelly reports that he made it home without any further incident last night.

I slept in for a nice long time this morning, then had a leisurely shower, picked up some food from Eze Bleu and got fresh water from Nashinoki Shrine for the first time in quite a while. It felt nice to have such a relaxing morning. (After coffee and breakfast with Sawa it was already 1:30 by the time I thought about doing anything productive.) Since Sawa and I are presenting in Morita-sensei’s class on Thursday, I had to move the final machiya English class from this Thursday to today, so I spent the two hours before this class doing some long-overdue laundry and getting ready for the final class. Oh, and reading the NY Times…

Since we were pretty much set with our original lyrics based on Amazing Grace we’re performing at the presentation next Saturday, I just thought of a couple of word games to play this time (20 questions and Celebrity – an awesome game like Taboo but even better and without the need for an official set). They actually went really well and I wished I’d just played games like that with them earlier. I think the way I taught the class was not so suited to the class – I tried to teach it in a similar way to the way I teach my university class, or a little like I do my weekly conversation, but the real difference is that I don’t always know who’ll be there each week. Thus, it doesn’t make as much sense to keep building up things week by week, because probably half the people who were there the previous week won’t be there and half the people who are there won’t have been there the week before. I think just doing fun word games that get people a chance to practice speaking English is probably the way to go. It looks like potentially Chris and I might both teach the same type of class next semester (one doing kids and one doing the adults, just like I do now with my friend Tom), so maybe we can try out something like that next time.

I went off to my basketball practice around 6:30pm, and who should I meet biking through the imperial palace than my friend Oli, fresh off the plane and on his way to the dorm to stay for 3 months or so! I had to go to my practice first (which was very fun, but with the humidity by the end my clothes were completely drenched in sweat), but after I got back and took a shower and rinsed out my clothes me, Oli and Sawa went to get a nice meal at Dish (this cute little Italian restaurant right nearby).

After that Oli feel asleep, exhausted from jet-lag, and I practiced shamisen for an hour and am now just about ready for bed. (What an unusual feeling to only have a single day to write about in my blog and not be trying to catch up on an entire week or so!)

Mum and Kel in Kyoto

On Friday, I taught my class, which went OK, although I had very limited success trying to teach them how to turn their grotesque attempts at thesis statements into good thesis statements. I figure though, that if they learn just a little bit, or just get the idea that the point of writing an essay is to communicate an interesting idea to someone, I’ll have helped them out.

After my class and a very short appearance at the basketball practice, I trained back to meet my mum and brother and Sawa for a dinner celebrating my birthday and mum’s (at Bimota, of course).

My brother Kelly came up to Kyoto for the whole weekend for the first time since the wedding, so we all spent the whole weekend hanging out, hence my lack of updates. We mostly just hung out, ate, and talked a lot, which was a lot of fun. It’s been so long since I’ve just been able to just hang out with my family, without organizing weddings or anything like that. It makes me excited for when we’ll be back in Wellington and near enough to do it with my whole family and Sawa pretty much any time we want to.

On Saturday we spent the day in Uji checking out my mum’s new apartment and office, seeing the famous Byodoin temple that appears on the 10 yen coin

and eating some delicious ice cream and shaved ice stuff, made with the maccha that is Uji’s specialty.

We took an extremely scenic train ride back (in the sense that we got on the Keihan line in the wrong direction and only noticed after going 45 minutes and reaching the end of the line off in Osaka, then rode all the way back. However, we got to sit all together in a four-seater facing each other and talked a lot). Back in Kyoto, we had some delicious takoyaki and then Mum headed back to Uji.

It was just the right balance of sleeping late, hanging out, sightseeing and eating and talking. Oh, and it was blazingly hot out, so it was wonderful to have nice cold icey sweet food. I guess I haven’t mentioned much about the weather lately, but it seems that the rainy season that we’ve been in for the last month has officially ended and now we’re just at the beginning of the two or three months of incredibly humid, hot, sticky weather where you really don’t feel like going outside. Fortunately, just as the all-you-can-heat heater came in handy during the winter, now the all-you-can-cool air conditioner looks like it’s about to be my saviour.

That night, Kel and I hung out with some people from Full House at the Kamo River, then went down to a club together.

Unfortunately, Sawa’s cough still hasn’t let up so she didn’t feel up to hanging out. After getting back around 3:30am or so, we had a nice leisurely sleep in before getting up, meeting up with mum for some lunch, cheescake and drinks at Papa Jon’s, and hanging out in my room talking together and with dad on Skype. Then Kel and I headed off to my basketball practice and said goodbye to Mum. After an hour or so there I took Kel to the train station, where I think we just barely got him on the right path to get the last train to his place, although it’s certainly possible he could get lost on the way back and end up sleeping in a train station over night…

Last movie night

Yesterday I only had my Noh lesson in the afternoon, so Sawa and I slept nice and late, then I stopped by the International Community House on my way to my lesson to check about the logistics for getting this band tour of Japan and just for finding work on my own. Both of these seem to be a little harder than I thought… My noh lesson was fine, but I’m feeling like I don’t know how much more I’m really getting out of it. I think maybe in a month or two I might stop having them.

Then, last night I went to yakiniku with a bunch of people from Richard’s House. There was a great all-you-can-eat place for only ¥2200.

It was fun to see some of them who I hadn’t seen for a while. Then we had a dorm meeting that night, but there was nothing particularly eventful.

Today we had the English conversation lunch as usual. For the last three weeks or so there’s been a big new crew coming from some office, so the numbers suddenly jumped from just me, Takada-san and Fukushima-san to about 8 people or so. Then, I had my weekly 1-on-1 English conversation, then Sawa and I went to see Reiko present in Morita-sensei’s class about Amherst as the former Nijima scholar. next week Sawa and I will both present as “guest lecturers”. We’re trying to think about how to make it interesting and get the students involved, but it will be really hard, because they are super passive and we only have one class, not a whole semester like I have with my own students to gradually build up there participation. It should be a fun challenge, though.

I left halfway through to go teach my class at the machiya, which was OK. Unfortunately, every week the people there changes a little, and now that we’re working towards this final presentation it gets hard having some people who’ve written their lyrics and some who haven’t. Also, I was surprised to find that we were finished earlier than I thought and I hadn’t really prepared anything else to do. Monday were having our last class, so I’ll just try to think of something fun to do, then we’ll all sing our original song at the final presentation the following weekend. These English teaching things pay pretty well, but I really don’t feel like like I have that much I can help them with. There are often very different levels, and if it’s not one-on-one it’s hard to focus on specific problems. Also, I just am not super-excited about teaching English, so I’m hoping to get some more interesting work after the Fellowship, even if it means getting a much smaller salary.

Tonight Sawa made quesadillas, marking the first time in four or five months we’ve eaten a home-cooked meal together at her apartment. From now on we should get back into that groove.

From there, I went back to the dorm for our final movie night for a while. People are getting a little busy and the novelty’s wearing off, so from now on we’re just going to have a weekly barbecue, since people have to eat anyway. Today, though, we watched Tonari no Totoro, one of my favourite movies, for the first time in a couple of years. It’s so good!

Mum moves to Kyoto

(Whoops, I thought I had published this on July 1st, but somehow only saved it as a draft)

Haha, I’m finally up-to-date with my blog, so much so that I’m updating it twice on the same day, once in the morning and once at night!

Today my shamisen lesson was good. I’ve just started working on the two pieces I’m going to play at this big recital next month – one on the koto and one singing while playing the shamisen. Since I’m running low on funds I might have to call it quits for my lessons after that, but we’ll see how it goes and how my job situation is.

Afterwards I did some errands that made me feel very productive: I paid my health insurance and got my brand-new spouse visa! Oh, and it turned out that my mum couldn’t make it to Kyoto in time to move into her new place because of some delays on her work, so I had to clean up my room so she could crash there tonight. This was good, as I had been meaning to do that anyway and it was a good incentive.

So, after that it was time for me and Sawa to meet Mum at Kyoto station. We had a tasty dinner at this Japanese-style spaghetti restaurant in Kyoto station for the first time in ages, then I got mum settled into my room and she crashed. The ryosei and some other students from Richards House were having a barbecuey thing on the veranda, so I hung out with them for a little while and then went back to Sawa’s place.

Over some tea and gomatamago souvenirs that Mum got us, we talked about our plans for the future for the first time in a little while. I realized there’s one major issue with my becoming a professor, which is that it might make it very hard for me to get a job in Japan if me and Sawa want to be there for a while. One idea that seems like it could be the best to keep that option open and not compromise too much on my career goals is to do a Masters on something related to Japanese music in Japan at a Japanese university. This would be pretty challenging to do in Japanese, but I think manageable, and could be the only way I’d really force myself to bring my Japanese to the level I’d need it to be to do work as a professor in Japan.

There are so many options and possibilities for what to do in the next few months and years it’s quite daunting to figure them out, but his certainly could be a possibility. Whatever happens later, I realized that although my Japanese has improved a lot, Ive started getting complacent and not pushing myself to improve as much as I should be, so I think I want to focus a lot on that for the rest of the Fellowship and up at least until I take the 1st level Japanese Proficiency Test in December. Me and Sawa might try implementing a Japanese-speaking system again like we and tried and failed back at the very beginning of the Fellowship when my Japanese wasn’t nearly as good.

OK, that’s it for today, hopefully I’ll be back on a decent blogging schedule now, although I’ve certainly made that claim falsely many times in the past…

Basketball Camp

So after we went to dinner and karaoke with my friend, I woke up early the next day to go on a two-day camp with my basketball club. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so I didn’t get any good pictures.

It was a lot of fun and an interesting experience learning about life in Japanese clubs. First off, it was just great to play so much basketball again, although there was the same problem as there is at the Kyo-tanabe practices of having two many people and having to rest for about 20-30 minutes to play for as little as one 5-minute half. To overcome that, on the first day they just had a long practice instead of playing games, but it was pretty boring and I much preferred the tournament of the second day, even with the waiting. Fortunately, all the teams were closely matched and the games were exciting.

In the evening after the first day of practicing, I played a bunch of cards with the fourth years, then we had a nice sukiyaki dinner and then a nomikai. It was interesting to see how compartmentalized the groups are. Of course, as always, the guys and girls really separate like oil and water and there is very little interaction between them. Beyond that, jouge kankei (senior-junior relations) are very strong and the different years often keep to themselves, and there’s barriers to them interacting freely. It seemed like the nomikai was the only time that there was much interaction between either boys/girls or seniors/juniors, which makes me see a concrete reason that drinking is such an important thing in Japan if it’s the only real way to break down the social barriers.

After I got back on Sunday night, we just hung out with Jenny and talked for a long time, then did the same the next morning over okonimyaki and coffee and then saw her off at the train station. Then me and Sawa went downtown to do some errands, Ranbo made a delicious misoey soupey dinner that he shared with us and I practiced shamisen and koto. Now I’m off to my shamisen lesson, then I’m off to meet my Mum, who’s moving into Kyoto today to work at Kyoto University for two months of her sabbatical!