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!
