“To David and Jorden, and to a great year at Izumigaoka!” Omote-Sensei piped cheerfully as overfilled beer glasses clinked and a resounding “kampai!” rang through the quaint, traditional-Japanese style dining room. We sat with legs folded at the low table as the servers delivered trays of fresh sashimi, tuna-topped salad, steamed salmon, rice balls, steak, edamame, and battered shrimp. It was my first Japanese drinking party--or enkai--held in honor of welcoming David, my fellow ALT, and me to Izumigaoka. The twelve English teachers at our school (yes, twelve--remember how at your high school there was that one French teacher or that one Spanish professor?) all sacrificed their Friday night plans to toast the newbies and enjoy some fine Japanese cuisine. Enkais are the once-or-twice-a-year opportunity for teachers who normally work 12 hour+ days to unwind, talk freely about their opinions and interests, and of course, drink until their hearts are content. Small talk in the office is nearly taboo on a day-to-day basis; in Japan, the teachers who work the longest days and maintain the busiest agendas are the ones respected most. I suppose “work hard, party hard,” might be a good mantra to sum it up. All that to say, it was an interesting spectacle on Friday night to watch my otherwise reticent colleagues let the conversations flow just as generously as the beer. They suddenly had so much interest in why I chose Japan, what my initial impressions were, and how education in America compared to that of Japan. The room was loud and jovial--far more so than I could ever imagine a room of Japanese school teachers to be. At the end of the evening, I offered a brief thank-you speech and the teachers, all ruddy and beaming, dipped their heads and clapped.
Monday morning has not yet come, but I think it’s safe to assume it will be business as usual.
I’ve had two full weeks of regular classes now, and it’s been quite a roller coaster. This past week, David and I were given the responsibility of creating a term exam for the Oral Communication (first-grader) course. We finally finished it on Friday after five days of extensive collaboration, but lemme tell you, it wasn’t easy. I find that typically, my colleagues are not forthcoming with information; rather, I have to seek it. In addition, they consider it rude to be direct about their expectations or desires. So as you can imagine, tasks are often completed rather inefficiently, and even then, often not to the standards of the person who assigned them. Daniel and I joke that working as ALTs sometimes feels like playing a game of charades. “Okay, it’s a bird? No, okay...it has three syllables? It flies? Does it fly? It sounds like…‘trapeze’?” Sometimes I will do an assignment for a teacher five or six times before they seem happy with it; I just have to keep bringing them drafts until the look on their face tells me, “Yes, this is what I wanted you to do in the first place.”
Fortunately, that’s probably the worst thing about my job. The students are such joys; working at a high-academic school, though busy, certainly has its perks. I went to a speech contest last weekend in which three of my English club students participated, and they walked away with the first, second, and third place medals proudly in their hands. These kids genuinely want to learn English, earn high marks, and go to the finest universities in Japan where they can become doctors, lawyers, and engineers. They want to travel the world and speak multiple languages. One student, Taka, comes and visits my desk nearly every day. “I enjoy speaking to you in English very much,” he tells me. Taka wants to be an engineer, and I’d say he’s well on his way. His English is phenomenal; the other day he used the words “liquid nitrogen” to explain an experiment to me. He reads physics books for leisure--but get this, he reads them in English. Can you imagine reading a physics book in Japanese? Yeah, me neither. As if understanding the concepts of terminal velocity or centrifugal force in English aren’t difficult already.
The students at Izumigaoka are unwavering in their dedication to academia--sometimes to a fault. I like to ask my students what their weekend plans are, and thus far, I have never heard an answer outside of “studying.” I’ll let you know as soon as one of them admits to a video game marathon or an all-night karaoke bash, but something tells me I won’t hear that at Izumigaoka.
My weekends, however, are quite leisurely. I get to spend Saturdays with my copilot, exploring our new city, experimenting with strange cuisine, hanging out laundry, decorating our cozy apartment, and, as of late, watching way too many episodes of 24. Sundays are the best--true to its name, Hope House has already been a very promising community for Daniel and I to begin to sink our young, newly-wed roots into. It feels invigorating to become a part of something completely new, completely removed from anyone or anything we’ve ever been a part of before. We didn’t go because a college friend invited us or because it happened to be the only church we could catch a ride to. We went because we decided that we want a marriage rooted and saturated in the Gospel and we can’t very feasibly make that happen without a church community. We went because we are young and stupid and we need a place to be sharpened and guided. Because we are selfish and we need a place of forgiveness. Because we are lazy and we need a place where we can sacrifice and serve. For the first time, I am beginning to explore what it truly means to be part of a church community, and I’m thanking Jesus for his mercy in the process.
P.S. We apologize for the shortage of pictures thus far--more to come soon!
