なんでやねん！ I suck at writing in this blog. It’s one of those things where I want to catch up but it’s so overwhelming that I can’t, then I just get more behind, and more overwhelmed, and I want to make an accurate picture of Japan here which also makes me nervous, but forget that! I’m starting this blog now! I’m not restricted to the unidirectional flow of time, so I’m gonna go back and talk about old stuff if I want to!!! even after I talk about new stuff!! YEAH!
So, this weekend was the all-city middle school sports competition. There are 8 middle schools in Shiso-shi and I think a few times a year they get together and yell a lot and compete for not only their pride, but this lovely spear-like thing with red and white ribbons on it that have all the previous winners on them. I was so proud of my kids!! Even though I’ve only been here for a short time and I still can barely remember anyone’s name, to see them all really doing their best (they’re way into sports here) made me so happy. I went to see the soccer game against C’s school, girl’s volleyball, the brass band, and baseball – it was so fun.
The thing that is constantly shocking me about this school is (what seems to me like) the amount of support students show for each other. For instance at sports day (the sports competition just at my school – this was a few weeks ago) the boys and girls were split up for one event and the girls did a dance and the boys did this superhuman-pyramid thing, and while the girls were dancing a few of the boys were mock dancing along, but at the end they all really clapped for them really sincerely- and when they boys were on doing their super disciplined gymnastics, I could hear the girls going “wow, that’s so cool, that’s really great, they look so cool” and so on. I mean, maybe I just had a bad middle school experience (also true) but to have the girls and the boys almost unanimously supporting each other really surprised me. This weekend too, I was at the brass band show where all the schools were performing and I ran into a few students, and I saw two of the guys from the baseball team (baseball team = coolness level of being on the football team at home) who seem to be the cool, popular kids at school. And they were totally there to support the band! I mean, maybe I’m making a bigger deal out of this than I should, but I can’t imagine anyone going to see the band at my middle school unless we were playing DURING a football game or unless you had some kind of personal obligation to go… Sure, maybe those kids were obligated for some reason but I get the feeling that it’s more just that there is a lot of support here from students to other students and I think it’s so great. I’ll keep you updated on my observations in case I turn out to be wrong.
Something else I love about living here, aside from the awesomenosity of my students, is kansai-ben. (Kansai dialect. I’m going to call it kansai-ben from now on) Living outside of Osaka and with my host family gave me a pretty good amount of exposure to this fantastic dialect of Japanese (which I love and am obsessed with) but being here is like 24/7 super kansai-ben experience. In some ways you can think of kansai-ben as like a southern drawl, or california beach english, or something like that, but I think what’s so interesting is that most people also speak “standard” Japanese – of course they’ll still probably have a bit of an accent, but anyone who does business outside of the kansai region basically has to be able to speak without using the dialect at all, since it’s kind of looked down upon as crude and uncultured by tokyo people. I mean, as far as standardizing one’s speech, I guess people from the south could cut “y’all” and those kinds of words out, but Kansai-ben really is pretty different from standard Japanese. (negations are different – 食べない is 食べへん, and interestingly the past tense negative is 食べへんかった, sentence endings/particles are different – だよ is やで, だね is やねん, some words are preferred over standard versions like アホ instead of バカ and めっちゃ instead of すごく, and my personal fav is the shortening of 違う（ちがう） to ちゃう, and so on. anyway find out more here because I will be banging on about kansai-ben forever in this blog. promise.) but even though many people learn to cut the kansai-ben out of their speech (as was the case with more people in osaka since they’re doing business with more of the rest of the country) it is totally normal here. In hirakata, people would speak to me in standard japanese since it’s easier to understand, but here I get kansai-ben all the time and even though it shrinks my comprehension to an even more pathetic level than when I’m being spoken to more standardly, I’m totally thrilled about it. There is also a dialect specific to my part of Hyogo-ken, and one of the teachers here is teaching me some words of it. It’s going to be awesome. I’m going to talk about this a lot in the future so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Teaching has been going well – it’s always hard and I really want my students to be excited about English. I know the way it’s taught makes it just one subject among others, but I want them to feel like (and of course this is my bias) English is something different – unlike learning times tables and memorizing facts about the Meiji restoration, English is something that can open so many doors for them. They’ll have the ability to travel outside of a bubble of Japanese people, they can meet and communicate with people all over the world, they can get better jobs, they can feel confident as a speaker of English in a country where there are so few of them. Of course science and math and stuff are important, but I feel like Japan is a hard country to understand and I want these kids to feel like they can take that understanding and give it to someone else instead of stewing inside a country that generally speaking, just likes itself a lot. Super lofty dreams, but those are things I’m really excited about. I really want them to feel like how I feel when I’m able to communicate with someone in Japanese, and whenever I have a bad class or don’t know what to do, I just try to think back to these things because I think they are important. I can’t teach them English completely and I can’t make them fluent but if I could make them like a quarter of the way as excited about this stuff as I am I think that would be such a victory. Enough rambling about that for right now.
So this is kind of what I’m thinking about, just little observations that I want to share with you…When I actually get out of my town and go travelling I’ll also do the whole “omg shrines! omg sushi! omg check it out japan i’m in japan woo!!” thing and post pictures, but these are the kinds of things I’m thinking about in my every day life so I think they’re important to share too.
これからも、よろしくっ！！XD
ps: check out some music that i like- “ashiato” by BAReeeeeeeeeeeN
Kansai-ben is overwhelming. “Standard” is hard enough to remember. :( But I do like the feel of it. I think if I can learn more I will feel better.