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.
