Midaregami

For two consecutive mornings I’ve woken up to depraved porn site spam all over my blog. Thus comments are now off and will remain so until I can implement a solution.

I hate these bastard spammers.

Some songs I want to sing to my hypothetical future children when they’re sleepy, before they’re too old to think singing isn’t cool:

• Shenandoah (Trad.)
• The Briar and the Rose (Tom Waits)
• My Favorite Things (Sound of Music)
• God Only Knows (The Beach Boys)
• Neko ni Naritai (“I want to be a kitty,” Spitz)
• Mononoke-Hime (Jo Hisaishi)
• Blonde on Blonde (Nada Surf)

The best kind of albums are the ones you rediscover. You know, the one that catches your eye months after you buy the damn thing on a whim, play it, think “not bad,” and then pull it from heavy rotation because you just bought Go!Go!7188’s “Gyotaku” and it’s demanding your attention right now, like a noisy toddler with a talent for electric guitar. I mean, not that this happened to me. I’m just saying.

Returning to the matter at hand, we will be discussing such a rediscovery today. The album is a compilation of Spitz covers, titled “Sweets for my Spitz—Ichigoichie.” “Ichi Go Ichi E” is one of those damnable four-character kanji compounds. It means, “A meeting that comes once in a lifetime.”

Perhaps this implies that this is the only time such a compilation will be produced, and that, readers, is a crying shame.

I recently finished grading 200-odd midterm exams. There was a short vocabulary section, where students had to write the Japanese equivalent of the English word.

One of these words was “sand,” as it appeared in my description of New Mexico. A very common error (committed by roughly a quarter of students) was to translate this as “hasamu,” which means, “to hold beween,” or “to sandwich.” The Japanese often shorten “sandwich” to “sand,” and my poor students assumed that we do the same thing in English. Oops.

But that didn’t top the best one. Another word I had them translate was “balloon,” which most students got. One student didn’t, but made a great mistake. He wrote “danshaku,” which is the Japanese word for baron. I wanted to give him credit just for screwing up with such style and grace. Classic.

I got Back Horn Tickets! July 2nd, Osaka!

And L’Arc is in just a couple of weeks. Ah, sweet, sweet success.

I can’t decide to teach “hard” or “easy,” and don’t tell me the solution is obvious.

Striking a balance between discipline and slack has been difficult for me since my first day here. I’m really not any closer to finding a solution than I was before.

Whenever I grade a major exam, lots of students do C-level work. C, the mythical average grade. But when students do this poorly (and yes, it is poorly; to get a C on my tests, one has to be guessing much of the time) I don’t find myself thinking, “damn lazy kids,” but rather, “damn lazy teacher.” Because it’s my fault. It must be.

And I want to grade them with more slack, give them the benefit of the doubt on the trickier questions, be less strict about spelling, and so on. But I wonder—is this really doing them a favor? I know I always appreciated it in Japanese class when my teachers did the opposite, ruthlessly marking down my tests and homework for the slightest deviation from “perfect.” I didn’t like it, but it meant that when I did get a good grade, it meant something.

But it’s problematic. I don’t want to smack down every nitpicky errors, because that gives them the wrong impression about communication. If somebody were grading my spoken Japanese, there’d be red ink all over my mouth. YES. Because it’s not textbook-perfect all the time. I make stupid errors constantly. My written Japanese is the same. It happens. It has to happen. If I were worried about being perfect all the time, I would never be able to say anything—and this is exactly the problem my students have.

I don’t want to be accused of namby-pamby, touchy-feely, “outcome-based” education, but in the special case of language conversation classes, it is in fact the case that a student’s self-esteem is as important as their grasp of the technicalities of grammar and vocabulary. On the other hand, I don’t want to claim that such technicalities don’t matter, because they do. Small mistakes are okay, but big mistakes render one incomprehensible.

Teaching language is hard. Most of my students get Cs.

I know I’m not the only one out there who gets hacked off at this sort of thing. Let’s run through a little scenario:

Sombody gets into anime. It’s so awesome! It’s so different! It’s in Japanese! We’ll call our hero “Otaky,” and in our story, he’s a guy, though this phenomenon transcends gender. So Otaky watches a lot of anime. Then he decides to make a webpage all about the anime he loves, and why it’s better than everything else.

This time, The Back Horn’s “A Night of Sky, of Stars, of the Sea.”

These guys are weird. And they have a fixation on childhood.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I got my picture taken with a Takarasienne. Here it is.

I made it a point to be well-dressed this time around. I felt much less out-of-place on this second trip to Takarazuka. I dressed up, I knew the actors and the play, I had fan club tickets and one ochakai under my belt. I have a feeling that attending the theater could become something of a hobby, should I ever have the fortune to live near this town again.

Last year I was able to fulfill a long-held Japan Dream and attend a Takarazuka show. Yesterday I repeated the feat, and it was even better than the first one.

The day started out badly. I didn’t get to sleep until 1 AM the night before, and had to be out of bed at 7 AM to make the train. It had rained hard for at least 12 hours by that point, and showed no signs of abating. (It’s still raining now, in fact.) I had a 30-minute walk to the station, and I had no umbrella.

Digression: Because of my desert upbringing, daily use of an umbrella is a highly foreign experience to me. Thus I forget the damn things all over the place. I own three umbrellas, and they had all been forgotten at various schools. Maeva said that if she were to write a musical about my life, the forgetting of umbrellas would be a major leitmotif.

So despite the 75-degree rainforest-like weather, I threw on my semi-waterproof winter coat and fedora, and set out. By the time I got to the station, I was soaked from mid-thigh down, and unpleasantly sweaty to boot. A few choice words were muttered, nay, screamed, as the day was not starting well. I was short on cash, and had to pray that Maeva would have extra or that I’d be able to make a withdrawal in Takarazuka despite the dicey-on-weekends Japanese ATM system.

I provide this exhaustive detail on the awful morning only to set the rest of the day in sharp contrast to it. Because things got good, and then got better. My rain-soaked pants were dry by the time the show started.