Paradise City

Japanese Word of the Day

English: History
Japanese: Rekishi  (れきし or 歴史)

The JET program seems to really like orientations. Regular readers will remember that before leaving for Japan I had an orientation in Atlanta and upon arriving another for a few days in Tokyo. But they were both incredibly useful and interesting so knowing I had an upcoming orientation in Kyoto was a source of excitement. This orientation was specifically orchestrated to be for the JETs in the Kyoto prefecture and was held in Kyoto city, our “home base” of sorts. Now I live out in what we call the 田舎 (“inaka” or countryside) so getting to Kyoto is a good hour/hour and a half trip and 900￥(~$10) one way. The second day of orientation started bright and early at 8:30 A.M. so knowing this my supervisor offered to let me spend the night at his house in Kyoto between the days so I wouldn't have to get up super early (and pay nearly $40 in travel). So at that point I was excited for orientation and incredibly nervous about visiting my super’s home and proper etiquette. I did know that when visiting a Japanese house you should bring some sort of gift to show appreciation for the invitation. Japanese homes tend to be quite private so being invited is a big deal. Now the question was, what to bring? I recalled seeing a no-oven cookie recipe on cookpad (I have no oven) while browsing and decided homemade cookies would be a good choice. Time to cook!

Because I've been cooking awesome things like pizza I already had several of the ingredients I needed like flour, oil, eggs, etc. One thing I definitely needed was chocolate chips which proved remarkably hard to find. By which I mean I could not find them at all. Oddly, I found white chocolate chips but no regular. That’s fine, I’m a creative, liberal arts educated woman, I can improvise! So I bought a bar of chocolate, froze it, and cut it up and called it chips. Totally worked too!

The cookies turned out quite well (I’ll stick a link to the recipe at the bottom of the entry) though I burned a few and had to penalize myself by eating them. Can’t make a good impression with burned cookies and waste is bad! I wrapped them nicely then stuck them in plastic so they wouldn't turn into cookie dust in my bag.

Cookie dough+Microwave=Science!

Ok, got my cookies, I am so set for this orientation! …Oh right, I have to get there first. I had actually researched a route I felt fairly comfortable with before Allen let me know that he’d go with me to help me get around. He told me the plan and we agreed to meet at 8:40 outside the apartments before walking to the bus stop. The plan was to take the bus from Ujitawara over to Uji then hop the train into Kyoto proper before taking a bus to the orientation hotel. No problem right?

On the first bus ride to Uji proper I got a text from Namba-san (my supervisor who I was staying with) telling me that I “would” be picked up by his son at 17:00 and then go with his family to dinner. I had actually told him previously that there was a JET event that night that I wanted to go to so I could meet and network with my local peers. The reason I stuck ‘would’ in quotes was to emphasize his manner of speech; it comes across as very absolute demands when in fact it’s not a demand but an offer. That said, it’s still pretty scary when your super says “YOU WILL COME WITH MY FAMILY TO DINNER” and you have other plans. Allen encouraged me to just explain the situation and that he wouldn't take offense so I did. I was told that I should come to the house between 21-22:00 then. If you’re wondering why I’m talking in military time it’s because that’s what we use here in Japan and if I have to deal with it ya’ll do too. Right, so first crisis averted.  On to Kyoto!

Trains in Japan are awesome. They really are. They say arriving at 8:27 they mean 8:27 and if they don’t arrive then you can bet they’ll notify you of the delay and give an exact time the train will arrival. Thanks to such a delay we were able to catch a rapid express that was running a bit late into Kyoto. On the platform we spotted some other foreigners and well dressed foreigners in non major towns always means fellow JETs. Actually that’s probably untrue but in this case it did! Like magnets we gravitated to the other non-Japanese people and rode into Kyoto. We happened to be in the front car of the train and I was directly behind a glass wall separating the conductor which allowed me to watch his routine. Whenever the train stopped before restarting he had to point his white gloved hand to the time table and then do an exaggerated pointing gesture directly in front of the train. For some reason there was a slight delay and he kept starting his finger point then having to delay and restart again in a few seconds. It was pretty entertaining to watch.

Once in Kyoto we headed for the bus pool outside the station. We knew which bus we needed but the bus pool was absolutely massive and we’d have missed our bus if we went around to each stop to see if it was ours so we asked a friendly police officer who directed us. The other JETs from the train joined us at the bus and we merged into a super group of out of place foreigners that commandeered the back half of the bus.

Despite catching the rapid express train we were running a bit late so it was fortunate the bus route went right by our orientation hotel. We hopped out and hurried over to the hotel and slipped into seats after the end of what I presume was the first welcome speech. Japan likes speeches a lot so there are usually a welcome speech or two so I didn’t consider it a huge loss (though I do hate being late).

The next speaker was a gentlemen who had served in the JET program in the late 90s (give or take 5 years) and was now working for the Japanese government doing… something. It was early and the details probably don’t matter. Overall his speech was quite interesting as it told the history of the JET program, which I will try to massively condense. Basically, after WW2 Japan’s economy became very powerful and up until the 90s was incredibly strongly and growing massively. This led to some economic hard feelings with American businesses (again, massively paraphrasing here) and gave Japan a bit of a negative reputation. Japan had a ridiculous amount of disposable income and someone decided a solution to fix their reputation; bring a bunch of Americans over to live in Japan and develop a fondness for the country before returning home to spread this fondness. But those Americans need to work… what can they do? Why not teach English? English seems useful. And so the JET program was born! No really.

It wasn’t until the economy bubble collapsed and Japan’s economy began stalling that the true usefulness of the JET program was discovered. At this point Japanese companies were needing to get overseas business since the home market was so bad and to do so they needed a better grasp on the universal business language – English. So now all these JETs we’ve got developing a fondness for Japan are suddenly very useful for preparing students to go into work in an increasingly global Japan. Japan is actually still making changes to push English more and more. I believe it was 3 years ago English was introduced at the Elementary level (where I will be teaching!) where it hadn’t been before. At elementary school students have a home room teacher who teaches all subjects and were often not trained in English so now the JETs like me are even more useful. So yeah, JETs are a really respected commodity around here (or so I’m told). If you’re curious, the speaker told us that there’s a book called “Importing Diversity” by David Connell about the program and its origins more in depth.

Moving on with orientation, our speaker finished and we were given a break to get lunch. I spotted some JETs from my next town over (Uji) and decided to follow them in an effort to network. We ended up going to a nearby bakery and getting some really delicious breads for lunch. And no, I don’t mean breads like slices of different loaves; I mean like rolls with fillings and baked in meats, cheeses, and fruits. I got a roll I thought was a desert roll (it said “kurimi” which I read as “creamy”) that turned out to be filled with some sort of pink fishy stuff. It was ok. I absolutely adore cream filled rolls here though. In fact I just ate one with pudding in it before typing this, but I digress.

After heading back, orientation recommenced with a lesson plan swap. We had all been assigned a number of letter and arranged ourselves at tables based on that. After the first 15 minutes all the letters rotated around the room to the next table while the numbers stayed. This was a really great chance for newbies like me to get lesson plans (tried and proven ones!) to use and hear how different class types went over with different ages. I collected probably 20 or so different lesson plans and got lots of good ideas so it was an excellent exercise in my opinion.

After a short break the second half of the afternoon began wherein a few selected sempai (senior) JETs did their self introduction lessons to demonstrate for us newbies. During the first presentation, the man presenting made a reference to visiting “England” and showed a picture of Great Britain in its entirety. Our prefectural advisor, Mark, (who helped run the orientation) is from Scotland loudly exclaimed “WHAT?! England?!” to the amusement of all. The second presenter also had a slide saying he lived in England (to which he apologized to Mark) and the presenter had a picture of the UK with England’s flag transposed on all the countries. It was a frustrating afternoon for Mark.

After the introductions we were allowed to ask questions as “students” to complete the experience. Some of the better questions were someone asking “what’s your favorite color?” followed by two more people asking the exact same question immediately after. I guess that’s a thing that happens. Another person asked “what is love” but sadly the answer wasn't “baby don’t hurt me”. The self introduction lessons were really nice since the next day all the newbies would be giving mock presentations of our planned introductions with a partner JET acting as our JTE (Japanese teacher of English). My partner was Allen since he’s from my town and why not.  Luckily, I’d already asked him to look at my powerpoint so he was familiar with it. We nitpicked a few details and had it good to go for the next day.

So now it’s about 4:15 and orientation is over. My JET social event isn't until 5:30 so I have some time to kill. I notice a bunch of JETs heading in the general direction of the station so I follow along with some groups and kill time chatting with others. I was also told that apparently do not sound southern and had people guess I was from a more British location. Go figure. I also had a really nice discussion about feminism with two young women from South Africa that was quite interesting but I’m not going to pad this entry with it. Instead have a picture of tanabata cards in the station mall we waited around in.

In the Tanabata Festival people write down their wishes on paper and hang them in bamboo.
There's a lot of mythology behind it that's really cool but I can't fit it all in this box so google it!

As 5:30 approached my group headed over to the Kyoto Tower and up to the rooftop beer garden where our JET gathering was happening. Basically it was a 4 or so hour chance to hang out and network on the top of a tower in Kyoto and have an all-you-can-eat buffet and all-you-can-drink-beer… buffet. I didn’t really know but 3 or so of the people there so I picked a group and sat down. I’d like to take a moment to point out that I am inherently an introvert and this was rather difficult but knowing other English speakers is so important to your sanity as an ex-pat that it’s usually worth the struggle. In this case it definitely was. I met a young couple from northern Kyoto who were really nice. The husband was a JET and his wife had come with him and thus didn’t have the same JET network connections the rest of us did so she seemed excited to make contact with some people. I also got to chat with several people including Kyoto’s non-Scottish PA, Sammie, who is equally awesome. For those curious, I had a little bit of beer and then spent the rest of the evening with a radioactive looking tankard filled with melon soda. All-you-can-drink beer on tap? Nah bro, all-you-can-drink melon soda!

That bright green mug is delicious melon soda (though not mine).

The tower itself was very pretty after nightfall.

I had planned my route to Namba-sans house and decided I could leave around 9:00 and get there about 9:20 and be right in the middle of the time range he gave me. So when 9 struck, I excused myself from the group and headed out alone to the station. One of the really good things about Japan is the main bus station always seems to be next to the main train station, which the beer garden happened to be next to. Alright, I’m an expert on navigating the Japanese public transit system, let’s catch a bus!

…or not.

I want to clarify that I could have taken a bus but I made an executive decision not to. You see, Kyoto is a big city and big cities need a lot of buses. So the bus station for Kyoto was massive and seemed to be sectioned based on some system that probably makes a lot of sense if you can read Japanese and know the cities layout. I lack both of these skills so after checking a few bus stops for my bus I threw my hands in the air and went to the subway.

Subways are good. I like subways. Japanese train and subway systems are incredibly easy to navigate. You find the ticket station (usually some computers set in a wall) and check the map above them. The map shows you your station and all the routes out of your station and all the stations those routes go to as well as the fare to those stations. Then you give the computer money for your fare, get a ticket, and you’re good to go. Also, in Kyoto many signs are written in English since it’s a big tourist spot, so it’s even easier.

I took my subway train no problem but it popped me out back into the world about a 10 minute walk from Namba-san’s house, whereas the bus would've taken me right next to it. Oh well, time to walk. Good thing walking around in Japan at night is really safe. For the record, that’s not sarcasm, it really is, especially in a big town like Kyoto on a main street.

Using my handy-dandy-I’ll-never-dis-Apple-again Iphone I was navigated right to the front of Namba-san’s apartment complex. And then… oh hey, this entry is already really long. Opps, I guess I’ll have to break it into two. Guess you’ll just have to check back in a few days to find out what happens!

Bonus! Microwavable Cookie Recipe

In English but with metric amounts and Japanese microwave cooking instructions. Fair warning, I overcooked several of mine because they do cook from the inside so it's hard to tell when they're done.