Things I Keep Close

 

When I am at home, I spend most of my time at my desk. I eat there (like a loser), do makeup there, blog there… so I like to keep this area full of things that keep me going. Things and people that are important to me. I thought I’d share some of these things with you.

Photos – I have a lot of them. I like to have the people who have touched my life close to me. My friends from school, exchange student friends in Japan, my friends from when I worked in Japan, and my english teacher coworkers from the school I taught at. These people are all so important to me.

 

I also have a photo of myself as a maiko! The postcard to the left was actually bought after I dressed up that day, so the similarity is a coincidence. It was an amazing day that I spent with some friends dressing up, but it’s there to remind me to keep my “excited spirit” about me. It may no be cool to dress up as a maiko, and it may be “weeaboo”-like, but I don’t care. I frickin’ love geisha and maiko and all that jazz. And it was awesome being a maiko for the day.

 

The map on the right was given to me when I left Ise. I think of it as much as my hometown as I do Bury St Emunds. On the left is the wall where I have all the messages my students wrote me when I let Japan. I have one board for each class I taught. They have such wonderful comments on them, whenever I feel like I’m not doing well in general, I like to read through them and remember that I am a great person and that I made a difference in their lives. I miss my students so much.

 

This last one is also from an old student of mine. This sweet little girl who used to make a beeline for me every day drew this lovely picture of me. I used to have a necklace with a fish on it, and she’d come up and play with it, so she drew it in the picture.

What things do you keep near you in your home?

 

Strange Questions from Japan

As you may know, I used to live and work in Japan on the JET programme. During my few years there, I lived in the countryside – nothing but rice fields and mountains. The most beautiful place. But I was the only white person in my village – there was a Brazilian family and quite a few Chinese who worked at the factories nearby.

I just read a really interesting blog post by new Frankfurter Roots, Wings, and Other Things about questions American people ask her about Germany. I really hope that some of the things on that list are exaggerations!! It made me think back to my time in Japan and the funny things my Japanese friends and coworkers used to ask me.

Though it’s not a cultural question, coming in 3rd is this one exchange that happened in a class I was teaching along with my favourite Japanese co-worker, Mrs I. She’s retired now, but has so much passion for English – as soon as she retired she went back to university and started studying English again! Anyway, this happened in a 2nd grade class – kids around 12 years old. Mrs I was explaining all the different ways the work “by” can be used… “get this done by 2pm”, “I went by train”… when one boy put his hand up.

“Mrs I, my dad says that ‘by’ means when a man loves women but also men as well. Is this true?!”

Mrs I looked bewildered – she’d never contemplated such people existing before – and turned to me, expecting a reply. Luckily I was saved by the bell…

In at number 2…

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the students of the school have to take out 20 minutes to clean the school. I say clean… it was mainly lazy, useless efforts of general doing-stuff and rarely benefited to how clean the school was. There isn’t any hot water in the school except for the one hot water tap in the teacher’s office, which is turned off in summer. I have another funny story about how I had to explain to my current 30 year old Japanese roommate about why we have to clean things with hot water, because Japanese people just don’t get it… They wash their hands in cold water after going to the toilet, they clean things with cold water… even their washing machines use only luke warm water at best…

I digress.

So one day I was helping the children sweep the teacher’s office. Mr S, the humanities teacher who was the only non-English teacher who ever bothered talking to me, came over and said -

“Say, Charlotte! You’re pretty good at sweeping!”

I looked confused, and said thank you.

“Especially since you don’t have brooms in England!!”

After a massive face palm, I tried to explain to Mr S that we do, in fact, have brooms in England – he had thought that because we have carpets, we use hoovers and not brooms. I said that my home back in England is over 300 years old and has oak flooring… definitely not hooverable!!

In first place for the most outrageous thing I have ever been asked, ever, in my life is…

In Japan I was so very, very lonely. After about a year of rolling around complaining about how lonely I was, I decided to go pro-active and go out and find friends. I used the Japanese social network Mixi, went to bars by myself, even went to singles parties and other events that foreigners aren’t exactly welcome to. It was at one of these singles parties that I met a guy called Mi-chan. He was there just because he was the organiser’s friend and not really looking for a girlfriend (the friend who came with me fell for him – a nice guy who baked cakes like a dream AND played the piano like a pro?! Japanese girl’s wet dream!!!)

He invited us (much to my friend’s delight) to his house for dinner the following week. When we got there, we met his lovely fiance… (haha, sorry friend!) and we all made dinner together. After dinner, we were sat down by a motherly woman in the group, who had brought along with her a white board and pamphlets. It was an Amway meeting.

After that first meeting, I didn’t see my friend again, but I made a few friends there in the Amway group and became a solid member of their gang. They knew full well I didn’t appreciate their spiel at the end of the activities they planned. But I was always happy to go along and learn cooking with them or have them do my makeup, and then I’d just go and help clean up the kitchen or something when they started to talk the members of the group into buying ridiculously expensive pans, or average makeup products. In return they got to be a classy section of the Amway club – they had their very own foreigner!

At one of these meetings (actually, it was the one where we all had our eyelashes permed… yes, this is a thing…) I met a woman who turned out to be the mother of one of my students. We became quite good friends, and I went over her house a few times for the meetings, and we were often at the same events together (much to the embarrassment of her son). After knowing her for about a year, we were at a BBQ together when she came to me and said -

“You know, I’ve wanted to ask you something ever since we first met… is it ok if I ask you? Uhm, so, you know how Japanese noses are very small… and foreigners’ noses are very tall… and you have that ridge thing in between your eyes at the top of your nose that we Japanese don’t have? Well… because of that part of your nose, do you have blind spots because it blocks your vision?!”

…

Japanese people are very conscious of the differences between their noses and western people’s noses. It’s one of the things people are commented on the most in Japan. But this…

I never minded when people asked me stuff like this – after all, it was my job to interact with normal people who wouldn’t get the chance to speak with foreigners. I just find it so funny to see myself as a foreigner through their eyes.

If you’ve ever been asked something crazy paving by people from other countries, I’d love to know!

My Tanabata Wish

Today is Tanabata, a day when the Japanese celebrate two lovers parted by the milky way who get to meet up tonight – and only tonight – if it’s a clear night.

To celebrate, Japanese people write wishes on strips of paper (that I searched in my photos for examples of … I didn’t find any nice photos of them there, sorry ) and hang them from bamboo branches. Every year that I was in Japan, I made sure to carefully write (at least!) one of these wishes. After all, it’s good handwriting practice! I think the first time, I wished to be Japanese. The second time I wished to pass the JLPT 2 test (I made a point of wishing so hard that I actively sought out every place where I could write wishes for tanabata!). When I was on JET I wished for my students to study hard and make good futures for themselves.

As I was walking into town this morning I was wondering what my wish would be for this year. I think, if I had some paper and some bamboo here, I’d wish to be a stronger, more confident person this year.

Ever since the second year of uni, right up until I started at Nintendo, I was pretty sure of myself – I worked hard, and liked to wallow in my skills and abilities (if it’s possible to do such a thing). At Nintendo, there are so many really amazing people that I feel I have lost my sense of strength while watching everyone around me do their amazing things.

This is really important to me now, since there is a new project starting that I will be leading and I am really nervous about it. I’ve “lead” things before now, but this will be a meaty project and I need to be on top of my game. There is no time for me to sit there gazing at everyone around me, I need to get up and join them.

Both inside and outside of work, I need to stand up for myself and be more confident in the person that I am.

What would your tanabata wish be today?

Learning Japanese From Scratch

A friend of mine who will be going to Japan on JET this summer recently asked me for help and advice on learning Japanese. Instead of just sharing things with her, I thought that I’d help other people reading this blog too!

I have absolutely no evidence to back this up, but it’s my feeling that Japanese is probably one of the most self-studied languages out there. With the popularity of anime and manga, and the lack of teachers out there in our home countries to teach us, the internet has become a great source for studying Japanese.

I was lucky enough to not only have a Japanese teacher available to me when I decided that I wanted to learn, but also that the teacher, Mary Grace Browning, is one of the most knowledgeable people in the UK on Japan. I started taking her classes when I was 16, though I didn’t take it seriously until I went to university and could dedicate all my time to learning the language.

But enough about me!

The first thing to do when starting to learn Japanese is to learn at least the hiragana alphabet (both to read and write) and if possible the katakana alphabet (at least to read). Japanese written out in the letters we use in English is called romaji and I would STRONGLY advise people to let go of this crutch as soon as possible when learning Japanese.

Learning the alphabets are pretty simple to do. Check out this link on hiragana. Take one row (starting with あ、い、う、え、お) and just write them over and over, saying them in your head as you write. You could even make flash cards. One row should take anything from a day to 4 days to memorise. Then just move on to the next and the next until you have them all down. Don’t forget to revisit previously learnt rows as you move on.

Now you have those down, let’s move on to some phrases. There are loads of lists of phrases on the internet. The BBC has a great site for Japanese, so starting there isn’t a bad idea. Another place you could go to is Tofugu’s Youtube channel (Tofugu’s website is also pretty awesome). Just type in “learn Japanese” into youtube and you’ll find so many videos.

Japanesepod101 is an AMAZING source of free podcasts that I used every day while at university. These really made a big difference to my level when I was starting out, and I still listen to them today as the highest levels are still very high for me sometimes.

For grammar, you can also find good resources online. This fast track website has it laid out really well. There are LOADS of other websites out there. This is just the first one I found that I liked.

Once you have some words and some grammar under your obi, it’s time to try it all out! Go to Lang-8 and write a diary with your new Japanese! Even if it’s just a sentence or so, people will read it and correct it and encourage you to keep going. I want to do a full post about Lang-8 because it really is great. But for now, I can just tell you that it is awesome.

With all of this, you should have a good foundation in Japanese on which you can start building to suit your needs. We like to keep this secret, but it’s actually not that hard to learn Japanese. It makes us look brainy but it’s actually a walk in the park compared to some other languages!!

And if all else fails, you can always learn Japanese while doing aerobics!!!

Things My Japanese Students Wrote

As I said last time, I really miss reading things from Japanese students. I think if you can get Japanese students to do *gasp!!* creative writing like this, it’s one of the best ways to get to know how they think and feel. It’s so interesting. Like you have cultural aspects like the marriage thing above.

Well… sometimes it’s much harder to get them to write anything worth while…

Things My Japanese Students Wrote

I’d like to just revisit some of the awesome things my Japanese students wrote while I was teaching over there on JET. I think these things are the parts that I miss the most from my life in Japan.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

That one above has got to be my all time favourite. The story of how he was bullied by a boy, then became friends with him after fighting him… it’s so cute, and yet so sad!