90% Chance of Inside-Out Umbrellas

Tuesday's weather forecast calls for Typhoon Guchol to reach Tokushima.

Keep an eye on those umbrellas!

 

The Second* Annual Ferdinand** Awards are here!

I love car names. I think they are fascinating and nonsensical all at the same time. At first glance, Odyssey sounds like a great name for a car, but who really wants to drive a vehicle named for a man whose journey home took approximately ten years longer than it should have?

"Are we there yet?"

The rules to win a Ferdinand:
1. I have to have seen the car, either driving or parked.
2. The name has to be interesting, noteworthy, or roast-worthy.


And the winners are ...

Best use of punctuation in a car name: That’s (Honda)

Best use of food for a car name: Cocoa (Daihatsu)

Best use of "It does what it says on the tin:" Carry (Suzuki)
It’s a pick-up truck.

Best use of a Biblical name: Noah (Toyota)
Does my seat double as a floatation device?

Best use of a nonsense word: Yaris (Toyota)
According to Toyota, Yaris is a hybrid of the German Ja and the Greek goddess Charis of beauty and grace. Toyota chose this combination because "we think this new name best symbolises the car's broad appeal in styling and is representative of Toyota's next generation of global cars."

Best use of a real word that is used for nonsense: Ipsum (Toyota)

Best use of a suffix: ist (Toyota)
Why "ist," you ask? I did not find it in English on the Toyota site, but I found this on wikipedia: "The name 'ist' is in reference to the suffix term '-ist,' which denotes something that adheres to, or is uniquely gifted in a specific talent, doctrine, or ability."

Best use of a suffix, Runner up: Vanette  (Nissan)

Best use of exponents: Cube³

Most awkward car name: Naked (Daihatsu)



*Second, because the first were in a letter I wrote to a friend when I lived in Tokyo.
**Father Ferdinand Verbiest, a Jesuit missionary to China, astronomer, mathematician, and inventor. Around the 1670s, he designed a steam-powered toy automobile, which some people claim is the oldest self-propelling vehicle.

How to Make Blonde Brownies in a Toaster Oven

I am considering changing the title of the blog into “Adventures in Toaster Oven Cooking.”


Blonde Brownies

0. Buy a tiny silicone cake pan.

1. Halve the recipe.

2. Melt butter and brown sugar (well, beige sugar) into a clump.

3. Add egg. Watch in horror as the realisation occurs that the pan isn’t cool enough. See egg cook as it hits the bottom of the pan.

4. Figure that butter is the most expensive thing in the ingredients, and since it’s unrecoverable at this point anyway, gamely go on.

5. Add flour. Lose count. Hope it’s not too much.

6. Add baking soda and baking powder.

7. Glob the mess into a small silicone pan.

8. Cover with tin foil so the top doesn’t burn.

9. Set temp to, oh, let’s say 160 Celsius. Wonder what that is in Fahrenheit.

10. Turn the “on” knob as far as it will go, which is 15 minutes. Come back every 15 minutes and turn again.

11. Take off tin foil when it seems the rest of the cake is far enough along.

12. Come back (again) in 15 minutes and realise it isn’t finished.

13. Burn fingers while reattaching tin foil to hot pan.

14. After another 15 minutes, give up, take the brownies out, and cut while warm, as recipe demands.

15. Turn brownies out onto cutting board, looking at the burnt bottom and uncooked, gooey middle.

16. Eat half the pan out of spite.

17. Go to bed. Try again tomorrow while dunking the rocky edges into your coffee to soften them up enough to not break your teeth as you gnaw on them.

(As a side bonus, you just learned how to make dwarf bread).

Teaching in Japan, Part 1

I have been trying to write an entry about teaching in Japan. However, I had a question about how long English has been taught in junior high here. In the midst of looking for the answer, I got sucked into Japan’s complicated history with the United States. What I ended up with is a three part series on the history of English study in Japan and where I fit into that today.

It’s not near enough to be a full report of history, however, I hope there is enough information to teach, without too much extraneous data.

Part 1: A (very) truncated history of English curriculum in Japan 

Students begin English lessons in junior high school. In fact, English has been taught in Japanese junior high schools on and off since the late nineteenth century.

In 1853, Japan opened its doors for trade with the United States.* It was a one-sided trading agreement, severely limiting Japan’s negotiating ability.  The Emperor decided the best way to overcome the inequality was to introduce English language learning. Scholars were sent abroad to learn English and classes were implemented four times a week at the junior high level.

Then, in 1924, the U.S. passed a law barring all Asians from immigrating to America. The English language curriculum fell out of favour in Japan, and was discontinued completely around the start of World War Two.

Junior high English classes re-appeared after the war. They’ve been a component of the Japanese education system ever since. Taking a cue from South Korea, English classes have recently been introduced in elementary schools one a once or twice a week basis.


*That’s a nice way of saying it. It such a nice way of describing the incident that it’s almost a lie. However, as the end result of Matthew Perry’s 1858 visit to Japan was, indeed, trade relations between the U.S. and Japan.


In the interest of being brief, I left out many interceding decades. A more complete timeline be found in the article “Globalization and the History of English Education” in the Asian EFL Journal:  http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/Sept_06_nfa.php

Other sources for this article are:
The U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian:
http://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/ImmigrationAct

Other various articles on English education in Japan:
http://web.iess.ehime-u.ac.jp/raineruto1/02RD2.pdf
http://www.cis.doshisha.ac.jp/kkitao/library/article/tejk.htm

Part Two: English learning today

The one thing any junior high foreign language curriculum lacks is adequate conversation time. I remember learning German in high school, which was great. However, I couldn’t practice German outside of class - with whom would I speak? I could write sentences, read, and learn grammar, but I would not learn how to pronounce it other than three hours a week.

Japanese students learning English are no different. So, although almost everyone in Japan has looked at an English textbook once in their life, if you ask them “Do you speak English?” they will say no.

The first difficulty in getting written English off the page and being spoken comes from all the extra letters English contains. In Japanese, V and B are the same sound. The same goes for L and R and a handful of other letter pairs.

This is only the start, as English words rarely sound like they look, and the trouble of F, ph, and gh sometimes all sharing the same sound is well-ridiculed in English, the most famous being the word ghoti being an alternative spelling for fish. A simple Google search, though, returns many rhymes and jokes based on English spelling’s aversion to consistency.

Japanese teachers of English have studied very hard over the years to get this pronunciation correct. Or, they have not studied it so much and feel inadequate to teach it. Hence, many English classes in Japanese schools focus only reading and writing.

Many solutions have been offered to teach English pronunciation. You may have heard of the JET program, in which native English speakers are hired by the Japanese government to teach English in junior high and high schools in conjunction with the native Japanese teacher. Also, Christian missionaries have come to Japan with the purpose of teaching English in addition to their evangelising. That is what took me to Tokyo in 2005.

Another option is for a Japanese student to find a native speaker and strike up a conversation. Since walking up to a stranger in the grocery store is difficult and uncommon (although not unheard of, as a man approached David and I just last month with the proud news that he had been on a language study tour in Canada), there exists in Japan an institution called the Eikaiwa.  An Eikaiwa is a private English school teaching conversation skills.


Ei, means "English."
Kaiwai means "conversation."
Eikaiwa.


Students who spend all day studying and adults who spend all day working go in the evenings or on weekends to learn conversation skills from a native teacher. This is where I work now.

Part 3: What I do in Japan

My students are 2-year-olds who barely speak Japanese, let alone English. They are active elementary students who have been studying English for one or two years already. They are junior high students dutifully learning English from their state-approved textbook. They are adults wanting to watch movies from Hollywood without subtitles and trying to become proficient speakers.

The point of an Eikaiwa (see above article) is to give people a place to speak a language they aren’t able to use in their everyday lives. Some adults want to retain language learned while living abroad, but have no chance to speak English once returning home. Others want to become fluent speakers for travel or business purposes.

Parents often want to give their children an early start at learning a language they will need once they get to junior high. They know the difficulties in learning language at that age, and how much easier it is to learn when they are young.

With the children, we "run" and "dance." We "jump" and "swim." We count and sing and identify fruits, vegetables, and animals. We learn grammar (an apple, grapes, a cat). With the adults, I also teach grammar, albeit slightly more advanced (i.e. What have you been doing?). We talk about current events - the eclipse was a fun topic. We practice sentence patterns in the form of a "Grammar Rap." Don't worry, it' is not near as bad as it sounds!

All of the students, but especially the children put me to shame. I am embarrassed by my lack of a second language. Sure, I studied a little German and Japanese and a smattering of Spanish, but I am not fluent in any of them. I have long been a proponent of teaching Spanish to children in the United States from a very early age and making it mandatory in schools. It not only easier to learn when they are young, but it paves the way for the elective foreign language they will choose of their own accord in junior high, as it becomes easier to learn a third language than a second. Being bilingual allows people more career opportunities than being monolingual. Not least of all, it opens up communication to more people and and enables the speaker to be a better global citizen.

For all of these same reasons, Japanese parents bring their children to me. 50 minutes, once a week. It isn’t much. It really isn’t even enough. But it’s a start. Therefore, I do my best to nurture the students in this global society.

Tokushima Sky

Sometimes I am depressed by the sky in Tokushima, those days when it is a single washed-out grey/white colour without depth or character. More often than anywhere I have experience, this flat dull sky hovers, mocking me, making me wish for the ever-changing mid-west sky.

But then, after a spectacular wind and lightening show, the clouds billow up above the mountains, allowing the mountain tops a chance to play hide-n-seek with the sky. The orange temple roof and nearby green of treetops are made even more vibrant against the black clouds. The colours are sharp and the sites are hazy in the mist and fog of a Tokushima storm.

Then I remind myself not to be too hard on Tokushima. The sky may take its time, but when it opens up, it is breathtakingly beautiful.

School Excursion: Tokushima Zoo

What looked to be a rainy day turned into a sunny day.
What looked to be too difficult a Scavenger Hunt turned into too easy a Scavenger Hunt.
What looked to be chaos turned into a fun day at the zoo for the UI students.

What do I say about a school field trip to the zoo?
There were children.
There were animals.
There were people dressed up as Japanese cartoon characters.
(Not our students or parents - it was a show put on at the zoo. Don’t ask me what it was about, because I didn’t understand).

It was pretty much everything one would expect from a school field trip, in Japan or anywhere!

Everyone had a great time, although almost everyone was finished with the scavenger hunt before lunch. As far as I can tell, no one was tripped up by the “Bird that sleeps during the day,” even though the duck was sleeping and the owl was awake. And many people were wearing striped shirts, so I waited for one them to turn themselves in as “An animal with stripes.” No one did.

On the other hand, I did not expect to sit down with a three-year old who sang “One little, two little, three little monkeys,” for me. He got tripped up at eleven, but heroically picked up again with fourteen and was up to nineteen before getting distracted by the people dressed up as Japanese cartoon characters. I really don’t know if he would have stopped at twenty or just kept going until I had to leave.

There were stickers and candy for the winners - which was everyone, not out of “fairness”, but because (as I mentioned) I needed to be tougher with my clues. Ah well. Next time.

Before beginning - explaining the rules and reviewing the English.

An animal from Japan. Check!

Lunch break - a game of tag and catching tadpoles.

The restaurant we ordered lunch from included an English word
game in the lunch boxes for us: Which word is different? 

Everyone received stickers because everyone
finished the scavenger hunt.

Handing out candy to one very smart three-year-old.

Firefly Festival

We had barely gotten home from the zoo and fallen into bed for a nap when the phone rang. Our landlady had invited us to a firefly festival on June 9. Discovering the festival was June 3, she hurriedly called and changed our outing, and could we still make it?

Two excursion in one day? Oh, why not?

In the end, the evening was too cool for fireflies, and the turnout was less than she had hoped. But, we did watch an amazing fire dance, so I am breaking my self-imposed “2-3 photos per post” rule in order to lavish you with fire.

There is talk about going back next weekend when the weather is expected to be more cooperative, and consequently the fireflies, too.

Fireworks Finale!