First Week of Work

Today is Saturday and I have now officially finished my first week of work. The children here are just wonderful. They all get excited when I arrive, even if I am only there to eat lunch with them. Those of you who are familiar with my special education job will understand the extent to which this is a refreshing change for me!

Monday found me at Nishiokoppe Junior High. Here in Japan, (or at least Nishiokoppe) the Jr. High students begin at what we would consider seventh grade and continue to ninth. However, here, the students are called first, second, and third graders. This has been a small source of confusion for me, thus I have deemed them to be "first years, second years, and third years" (a la Harry Potter). Otherwise, I constantly get my notes confused. The Jr. High students are a blast. I think I will have a great time with the third years (14 to 15 yr olds.). Thier English is not too shabby and I will be able to challenge them some. We ended the class with a name game/memory game. Each student named the persons before them in the circle ("she is..."), and then something the person stated they liked. I began and ended the circle. I was able to say thier names and remember what they said they liked, but I admit I had to keep cheating and look at the board where I had written thier names. It is so difficult to learn foriegn names! Anyway, I think they got a kick out of my going last and trying to remember everyone. It actually wasn't too difficult, as there were only seven students. The second year class has five or six, and the first year class has about the same. The school on a whole only has about 24 students.

Nishiokoppe Elementary ("shogakku") School was not quite ready for me to begin lessons, so I went there on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (after my stint at the Jr. High) to join them for lunch. The students serve the food, the entire school eats together (including staff!), and it is a very plesant situation. The staff and students speak very little English, so it makes for an interesting lunch time, with students and adults trying to show me the routine and help me using minimal language. They are all so very nice, though. I feel very welcome. I will finally teach a class with the first and second graders on Monday. My class should have about 15 students. Kamiokoppe Elementary School (about five minutes away) was a similar experience. The students and staff are awesome and the students are a blast. We played a few games after I had lunch with them.

School lunches here are very nutritious and students/adults can have as much as they want. There is a person on the board of education whose sole job is that of Nutritionist. Her responsibility is planning and executing healthy school lunches for the schools. We have to bring our own chopsticks ("hashi"), by the way! My first school lunch was grilled fish, rice, miso soup, and stir fryed veggies. The kids eat pretty much all of the food that is served. Friday was spaghetti day, seved with a Japanese version of Kraft parmesean cheese. It was fun to be the one most comfortable with a fork!

One of the biggest challenges this week has actually not been languaged based, but social expectations. We are having to really come to terms with the Japanese gender roles and expectations, in addition to the nuiances of living in a very, very small town. For example, I have no doubt that what we buy at the store is a topic of conversation in several households. It has already happened that somebody, while asking how we were managing with our cooking, mentioned that we had purchased some miso and wanted to know how that had gone for us.

The social structure of Japan is really radically different from America. Men and women have very defined, tradional gender roles, not unlike those found in America prior to the 60's. On Tuesday, the villiage assembly, board of education, school principals and vice principals held a welcoming ceremony for us. Nishiokoppe very much sees this teacher exchange as a cultural exchange between themselves and Juneau. It is very important to them to maintain and nurture this relationship. Being a very ceremonial culture, then, this "party" was quite ritualized and somewhat formal. Aaron, myself, and the boys were sat up front in four chairs, speeched were made (including one by me in Japanese! I'm sure my pronunciation was terrible, but I did my best!). We then sat around several large round tables to eat. After begining the meal, I was asked to stand and greet each guest with the usual greeting, "yorushuku onegaishimas" (no real translation), and pour some beer into thier glass. Then I could resume my seat next to the village mayor and continue eating my meal. It had been made clear at the beginning of the gathering that afterwards, Aaron was to go out with the men for drinks and (quote), "Michelle- sensei will please go home". Not a bit of rudeness was intended, that is just the way it is. Intellectually, I knew this, but it still chapped my hide a bit. Oh well. We have just been becoming more and more aware of how difficult it is to maintain our own relationship and roles within said relationship - and our roles as parents - while in a culture that says Aaron may be less of a man because he cooks dinner every night (never mind that I wash the dishes - according to them, I should be doing it all). So, we are struggling to find that balance between being ourselves and being mindful of the culture in which we are currently guests. The boys have beeing having a difficult time, so it has been a challenge to parent. Just through observation, I suspect the Japanese parenting style is very different. I try to not focus on that because, as a very wise person said to me recently, I am not trying to raise a Japanese child, so we will continue to do the best we can. We really love the people of Nishiokoppe and feel very lucky to have the opportunity to be here, so I know things will only get easier!

Now, a quick word about the photos, and then I must end this novel of a post! NOTE: remember you can click on them to enlarge them. We went walking today around the village (no car needed). These are photos of a local Shinto shrine. The white gate is the entrance at the bottom of a very long set of stairs. They feel even longer when you are carrying a 35 pound kid on your hip, too! The large stone with water is for washing your hands and mouth before entering the grounds. The building with the red roof is the actual shrine, which was closed. The ropes with ziz-zags or lightening-looking symbols indicate the presence of spirits. I suspect this is the shrine for the village gods. It was fun explaining to Ridge he needed to be respectful, as we were entering the house of a god. You can only imagine the questions that that particular statement generated! The picture of the tall stone with Ridge at the bottom is most likely some sort of grave site, but we aren't sure. I'll have to ask around.

By the way: please forgive any grammatical or spelling errors that may be present. I am almost always pooped after typing and am just too lazy to go back and re-read what I wrote. I had the same problem in college :)