Festival On, Wayne!

There are a lot of things that Japan does right. Sushi, cleaning, convenience stores, and seasonal produce are the first things that come to mind. I can’t get over their seasonal produce. Persimmons anyone?

But Japan also festivals it up like there’s no tomorrow. 

Even in a small, rural area like Miyazaki, we have really fun local festivals pretty much monthly and I always enjoy the chance to get out and see what folks in the community have been working so hard to put together.

A few weeks ago, some of my fellow ALTs starred in one of the local Hyuga festivals, so a big group of us came out to cheer them on. 

I wasn’t able to make it for the first night’s dance (I had a neck spasm? Am I eighty years old?), so I missed Lindsay and Cameron’s assuredly mesmerizing performance. 

However, I got to see Jodi playing taiko drums and stealing the show. We were all very proud. 

Jodi rocking her Taiko uniform

Afterwards, all the festival participants circled around a giant light up sumo man doing a choreographed dance. I took that as an opportunity so I jumped in too, even though I had no idea what I was doing. 

Nothing makes me want to dance like a sumo booty!

The dance consisted of movements mimicking different daily activities in the life of a Japanese farmer (or at least, that's what it seemed like to me). I was trying to pull off the “sun rise, tend to the rice field” dance move and smacked someone in the face.

They were cool with it. As they say in Wayne’s World, “Festival on, Garth!” 

Speech Contests

English Recitation Contest: We Mean Business!

Working as an elementary/junior high school English teacher in Japan can be described as a low stress, high reward job. You get paid to basically be a foreigner, show up on time, and be silly with children. What’s not to love?

Yet sometimes, I find that this sort of work cycles between being totally awesome and fulfilling (I get paid to sing the alphabet and play tag at recess? Perfect!) and feeling like a total waste of time. When I have classes, it’s a great job. 

But more often than not, I have several days where I’m sort of desk-warming at the town hall's board of education office. 

Getting paid to do nothing might sound like every loafer’s dream. But for me, especially at the beginning of my time here, it felt sort of demoralizing. 

Everyone else has something to do, clacking busily away at their laptops, while I just have eight hours of sitting and finding clever ways to pass the time. It makes me feel like I’m a child at the office's “take your daughter to work” day.  Except that my parent is a bunch of Japanese office workers who I can't really communicate with. I just don’t feel very connected to anyone or anything.

However, when my students are practicing for the Junior High School English speech contest, these feelings are suddenly completely obliterated. 

Suddenly I’m a pronunciation expert, acting teacher, and general English master with appointments in my planner and reasons to stay late at work. All the teachers direct their questions to me. I edit speeches, teach kids the way that native English speakers enunciate and intonate their sentences, and I even get to choreograph their gestures. 

I’m suddenly useful! It’s a great feeling!

Last year, after months of practice together, one of my students, Yuta, received first prize in the Northern Miyazaki prefecture speech contest. He wrote a great speech about his homestay experience in Australia, and his pronunciation was so natural!

Yuta had clearly worked incredibly hard on mastering all the tips the teachers and I gave him, which was super rewarding to witness. 

After the Northern contest, he then went on to receive fourth prize in the Miyazaki-wide speech contest in the following month. The top three students in that contest go on to the nation-wide speech contest in Tokyo. He was so close to going to Tokyo!

He did an amazing job, and seeing one of my students succeed was one of the best moments of my professional life.

So that was last year. This year, in September, another one of my students, Masaya, received first prize again in the Northern Miyazaki prefecture recitation contest (which is basically the same contest, only you don't write your own speech). It was so exciting, and I totally felt like a champion teacher. 

I think Masaya was a little bummed that he won however, because his high school examinations were coming up rapidly. Suddenly he had to study for the Miyazaki wide speech contest and his tests at the same time. Poor stressed out middle school students! 

So, last Tuesday, one of my favorite co-teachers, Noma sensei, and I road tripped to Miyazaki City to watch Masaya perform his speech in the prefecture-wide contest. 

The Miyazaki City Cultural Center, where all the speech contest magic happens.

We chatted about non-school things: boyfriends, food allergies and rude people. She made me laugh like crazy! It was great to spend time with a teacher friend outside of school and just relax together.

Masaya did not place in the prefecture wide contest, which was a little disappointing, but I think he was happy to be done with the whole process.  His family came to watch him perform, which was very cute, and they were all so proud of him! Noma sensei and I congratulated him on a job well done, and then we went out for lunch.

A happy Noma sensei pictured with Chicken Nanban four ways. Yum!

When I was in the US, I feel like a work event like this might have been a little bit annoying to me (“I have to stay late at school? I have to sit through middle school students giving speeches? Ugh!”). But now I’ve just become so grateful to get to know the people I work with and the students I teach on a more personal level. 

I’m always surprised and delighted when I notice these little changes in perspective. Here’s to another year of figuring things out in Japan!

Camping Champions

It can be tough when you have a five day weekend and dreams of traveling to far off lands, but no money in your bank account. I know. I've been there dozens of times.

One of those times was in September, during the silver week holidays here in Japan. So I decided to plan a camping trip with Alex, Luke and Jo for a little bit of budget-friendly outdoorsy fun. We spent three days at the Hourigawa campground, just an hour and a half north of Kadogawa town, and enjoyed hiking, river views, s'mores, and even hot springs relaxation time. The best part (or at least, a really great part) was that staying at the campsite only cost us 500円 per night (around $4.70). 

My bank account and my inner lumberjack were equally happy.

Cult-ure Festival?

When I was invited to Kadogawa Junior High School's culture festival, I didn't really know what to expect. I've never attended a culture festival in general, let alone in Japan.

When trying to envision what I might be in for, my brain brought up memories of my high school art shows: strange, technicolor paintings of nudes, wire sculptures of monsters with bananas for claws, ugly pottery fresh out the kiln. It was fun then, so I thought the Japanese version would be just as weird.

It was. Just in a different way.

Culture festival day. I sat on my knees on the gymnasium floor, scrunched up with approximately 200 other parents and their children, behind the teachers and students in uniform. There were no chairs, because I live in Japan. It reminded me of an indoor picnic mixed with a school assembly.

The main event consisted of watching my students perform speeches and sing songs, while a group of judges decided which of the classes was the most cultured. A difficult decision, considering that they were all junior high students. 

Judging twelve year old students on how cultured they are is like judging white bread on how spicy and bold its flavor is. It's just not practical.

But I digress. I hunkered down on the floor next to Inamura Sensei, a teacher I had worked with last year who had gone on maternity leave. She displayed her tiny, chubby, drooling baby for me, and I had about twenty minutes of pure joy when I would pinch her chubby cheeks and she would reciprocate with chubby smiles. The baby, not the teacher.

So far, culture festival seems pretty fun, right? Babies, indoor picnicking, spicy, bold flavors. It's everything I want out of a Sunday.

But then the singing starts.

The first graders (seventh graders in the U.S.) in class one come to the stage. The piano begins to play a jaunty tune. The kids begin to sing a lovely song about walking through the mountains on a summer day.

"Okay," I think to myself. "This is a fun little show. I can get into this. I'll have some nice traditional Japanese songs to hum throughout the day. I already feel more cultured."

The song finishes. The students leave the stage. The parents and I clap and nod approvingly to one another. 

The first graders in class two now come to the stage. The piano begins to play the same jaunty tune, and the students once again begin to sing the same song about the mountains and the summer day.

"Hmm..." I think to myself. "I guess that first performance was like a practice round, and now they're performing the song for real. Excellent, okay, yeah."

The song finishes. The students leave the stage again. The parents and I clap and nod approvingly to one another once again. We are in this together after all.

Class three. Jaunty tune. Mountains and summer day.

"Oh my god," I think. "Oh. My. God. They are going to sing the same song all damn day. Well, this is just first graders, right? Maybe we'll get a different song from the second graders. I guess I can listen to this five times without wanting to hit someone."

Cut to third graders, class five. Jaunty tune. Those awful mountains and that stupid summer day. 

I have counted. This song has been repeated fifteen times so far.

By this time, I have stopped thinking. The words in my brain have been replaced with Japanese song lyrics. I don't even understand most of them and yet they are there, repeating.

I have forgotten my past. I have forgotten my hopes and dreams. I am a robot, programmed to walk among the mountains and enjoy summer days.

When I finally leave the festival, and my soul returns to my body, I like to think that I feel a little more cultured than when I walked in.

But really I probably just have a new appreciation  for mountains and summer days. Too bad it's fall now.

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Japan Garbage Sorting

I've now lived in Miyazaki for over a year. It's interesting. I'm starting to forget things that were once totally commonplace to my life.

What street did I used to live on?

What was the name of that bookshop I used to frequent?

What do tacos taste like again?

But I suppose that makes sense. A whole new set of Japan-related things have replaced those old, outdated memories with new ones in my brain. It's just like recycling.

Speaking of recycling, recycling is one of those Japan related things that I just figured out how to do. Just this month.

I know that might seem crazy considering I have lived in Miyazaki for over a year already. However, if you know anything about garbage sorting in Japan, you'll understand.

Here's how they sort trash here:

Group 1: Burnable garbage (Picked up on Mondays and Thursdays)
This includes normal garbage like fish skeletons, used paper towels and the love letters that I wrote to myself (you know, usual stuff), but also Styrofoam, clothing, and aluminum foil.

All things that are not what I would classify as burnable.

But as I am not the recycling advisor of Japan, I just have to let it go. しょうがない。

Group 2: Plastics (Picked up on Fridays)
Anything plastic except for plastic bottles. Why would that be, you ask?

Group 3: Plastic bottles (Picked up on the third Wednesday of every month)
This is where it starts to get tricky. God forbid you drink too many bottles of Coke Zero, because you'll have them piled up under your sink for a month. And don't forget to remove the caps and plastic label to be placed in plastics!

Group 4: Recycling (Picked up from a remote location on the second Wednesday of every month)
If you weren't intimidated before, now is a good time to feel intimidated. Not only does the recycling need to be brought to a certain specific location in your neighborhood (and every neighborhood is different), it needs to be separated into brown glass, green glass, clear glass, steel cans, aluminum cans and cardboard. The labels need to be removed. They need to be clean. The cardboard needs to be flattened and stacked in an orderly pile before tying it off with twine.

We're not done yet!

Group 5: Wild Card (Pick up unknown)
This is anything that doesn't belong in the other groups. Batteries, broken appliances, CDs, ghosts. To this day, I don't know where it's picked up. I just have a box of these things in my closet that I try to forget about. It causes me anxiety.

And after all that, it's important to note that if things are improperly sorted, or placed in a non-regulation garbage bag, you'll receive a little pink note that reads, "You are ignorant. Here is your trash, returned to you. Try again, fool."

I'd like to say I've never received this note. But alas, even my superior garbage offerings have gone unaccepted by the trash goddesses.

However, today I turned in my recycling with every bottle cleaned, every label removed, every cardboard perfectly folded and wrapped in a perfect Christmas bow. The tiny garbage grandma checking over my work gave me an A+ and I went off to work with a skip in my step.

So I guess I know about garbage now. But what I really want to know is if I will ever enjoy a taco again.

I will pray to the garbage goddesses for an answer.

Desk Naps at Lunchtime

Two things I've noticed about working in the Board of Education office in Kadogawa town:

1. I've totally become immune to the number of office workers who wear Crocs shoes on a daily basis.

2. People use their lunch breaks to take naps with their heads down on their desks.

I love this practice of desk napping. I find it entertaining. Sometimes I even think that maybe I should take a desk nap-- however, I'm a known drooler, and I don't think I could deal with the embarrassment of waking up to a puddle of saliva on my laptop.

During my lunch breaks  lately, I've been trying to have a 45 minute adventure every day that I'm at the office. Why eat inside when the weather is still relatively nice? There's so much to see and do just within the limits of my town! I think mixing things up in daily life is the key to feeling more energized about your days.

Kadogawa Post-Typhoon

After being cooped up during another typhoon on Monday, I decided to go have a little me date at the beach across the street from my apartment. I packed up my camera and sketchbook and rode my bike over.

When I arrived, I was shocked at the size and shapes of the clouds against the clear sky. Nothing like some post typhoon views to put you in a creative mood.

Here's my black and white interpretation of Kadogawa Town, post typhoon.

Trips like this always remind me how good it feels to do something unexpected after work, instead of the usual hum drum.

Variety is the spice, am I right?

Tears in the Parking Lot: Failing the Japanese Driving Test

Okay. I know what you're thinking. "Haven't you been driving in Japan for over a year now? What's up with this Japanese driving test thing? Why does this story deserve a space on such a carefully cultivated and high tech blog?"

Believe me. It's a good story.

As an American ALT, I basically get one year to drive around with an "International Driving Permit." It's a handy document that gives me permission to drive anywhere in the world even if I don't know the rules of the road, even if I've never driven on the left, even if I have three arms and only one eyeball.

However, once that year is up, you no longer have a license. You're done. Poof.

ALTs from other countries can go to the DMV, fill out some paperwork, and get a whole new license. American ALTs, however, are not that lucky. We have to take a driving test.

"Driving test?" you say incredulously. "But I thought you've already been driving here for a year!"

Right. Which is why you think the driving test would be easy. Or at least, not nightmarish.

I was once like you. Naive. I thought driving tests were supposed to measure your ability to drive.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It all started when my coworker Haruka took me to turn in the preliminary paperwork. The guy checking my passport behind the counter asked me the normal questions ("Why did you go to China so much?"), before saying that foreigners ALWAYS fail the driving test.

"But I've been driving in Japan for a year now! How could I fail?" I protested.

"Well, you're not used to driving on the left," he replied.

I grit my teeth. "I've been DRIVING in JAPAN on the LEFT for a YEAR. I think it'll be fine," I say indignantly.

"Well, you'll probably drive too fast."


Fast forward to Sunday back at the DMV, where my friend Chris and I are taking a driving lesson together. I feel that a driving lesson is an unnecessary expense ($60 USD!), but after hearing all the other Miyazaki ALT driving test horror stories, I decide it might be better to be safe than sorry.

The driving test teaches us how to drive the course perfectly. We memorize exactly where we should use our turn signal, exactly where we should check our blind spots, exactly how many meters from the curb we should be at every moment of the course.

At the end of the lesson, I turn to our driving teacher, Suda San.

"Thank you very much for that great lesson! Now I'll pass for sure!" I chirp.

He laughs. "If you pass, please tell me."


In total, I had to take the driving test FOUR TIMES in order to obtain my Japanese driver's license. Each attempt costs $22 USD, and just getting to and from the DMV (without a car) ended up costing around $50. You are only allowed to attempt the test once each day.

 Here are the reasons I failed:

1. My first attempt. I turned a corner slightly too wide, and when I checked my blind spots before doing a lane change, the car swerved a bit. I was shocked and also totally embarrassed.
2. Second attempt. I took the corner slightly too wide once again. I drove slightly too slowly. After this attempt, I walked out into the parking lot and skyped my mom/my boyfriend, sobbing. I am a child. Then I bought a cheeseburger and tried to think positive thoughts.
3. Third attempt. The proctor stopped me at the first stop sign to tell me something in Japanese. I didn't understand. I asked him to repeat it. He said something else which I also didn't understand, and then was silent when I asked again. Thinking I failed, I spent the rest of the course not paying attention, completely freaking out. I rolled my tire over a shallow curb on the S curve portion. I pulled out into traffic, in front of a slow moving tractor, without seeing the tractor. In short, I was a complete mess. At the end, I asked the proctor what he had said at the stop sign portion. His reply was, "Oh, I just thought maybe you'd want to pull up a little closer to the line." OMG.
4. Fourth attempt. I think word had spread at the DMV that there was a peppy foreigner who couldn't pass her damn test. Everyone spoke to me only in English all day, even the proctor (I didn't know they had an English speaking proctor?) and told me not to be nervous. I think it helped. My tire even hit a curb and they still passed me. I think it's a conspiracy.

When the proctor told me I had passed, I burst into tears and asked if he was joking. 

He said he wasn't. I garbled a thank you and ran inside, giving a thumbs up to every person I passed on the way to the counter.

Moral of the story-- get your driver's license BEFORE your permit expires. In total, I spent around $360 USD just to pass this stupid test. If I could have driven my car to the DMV, it probably would have cost about half that price.

Oh well. At least I know I earned it.

Filbeys in Tokyo

Lately, things in my life have been slowing down a bit. School is officially out for summer next week, there was a 4.7 earthquake on Sunday and there's supposed to be a big typhoon tomorrow.

Just another summer day on Kyushu.

Given so much free time, I realized that I never got around to posting about my super fun trip with my parents around Tokyo. We ate decadent sushi, explored museums at Ueno Park, saw the amazing view from Tokyo tower, visited the Gundam Cafe, had teppanyaki on the 51st floor of our hotel (with my limited Japanese skills, I grossly underestimated how much that adventure would cost) and generally just had some awesome family bonding time.

Sushi restaurants at the Tsukiji Fish Market.

Dad squeezed onto the subway.

A look at the Imperial Palace Garden. The palace was closed, but it was still nice to see a glimpse.

Heading to Ueno Park! It was raining the whole time we visited Tokyo, so we had to buy three umbrellas. I now have an abundance of umbrellas in my apartment. They came in handy during rainy season.

The amazing plesiosaur skeleton at the Japan Museum of Nature and Science.  

The Gundam Cafe, my first experience with Tokyo's famous themed cafe. I only knew that Gundam was an anime show about robots, and my parents had literally no idea what was going on. When we walked in, the hostess asked, "Do you like Gundam?" in Japanese, and I was responded with, "I didn't watch it..." It was awkward.

"Get a load of this metal menu, amirite?!"

Both my parents thought all the crazy characters scattered around Tokyo were pretty fun, especially when they talked and moved (like the one pictured above).

But there's no mascot more beloved in Dad's heart than the Colonel.  We thought they even looked similar.

Our hotel, which my father was very excited to stay at because of that little bridge connecting the two towers. He was really into the bridge. I liked the art pieces in the park below.

At the top of the hotel, they had a very swanky teppanyaki place. My parents, who love teppanyaki, encouraged me to check the prices. I misread the menu. So we accidentally splurged one night.

But it was worth it. The food was mouth-watering and the view was even better. 

 Finally, we finished our sightseeing with a trip to Tokyo tower, where we looked out upon the whole city, took photographs, and chatted with other foreigners who were also enjoying the view. Tourist traps are great for making friends with other tourists!

I've been feeling monumentally homesick lately, so looking at these photos just makes me want to give the folks a big hug! I'm looking forward to a trip back to California in December for the holidays, but I suppose it's still a long ways away.

Until then, I guess I'll just deal with this whole typhoon situation and plan for speech contests.

Good thing I have an abundance of umbrellas.