The teachers that I work with arrive at school sometime around seven-thirty in the morning, and leave anywhere from five to eight to ten at night, only to occasionally go home and do more work. Teaching in Japan is one of the most exhausting, least rewarding jobs, they tell me. But they get paid a decent amount, they get insurance and bonuses. They get a much better deal than teachers in the States, but they have much more work.
The teachers in Japan have more say over discipline and behavior than the parents. When a student is in trouble for doing something either on school grounds or at home, or elsewhere in the city, it’s the homeroom teacher that is called in to talk to them. Can you think of anything worse than having to go to the principal’s office for back talking your parents after dinner? Or for fighting with your parents and then staying with a friend? Students in junior high and high school are not allowed to spend the night at their friend’s houses. The teachers believe there’s too much risk that if they’re with friends at night after school they’ll make “bad decisions.” I try not to laugh at how innocent it sometimes seems over here.
The students, most people know from anime, wear school uniforms. The boys wear either traditional buttoned up gokkuran or regular suit and tie, the girls sailor outfits or skirt suits and bows, depending on the school. Many elementary schools in my area have relaxed enough to let the students wear whatever they want, but in some places even elementary school students have uniforms.
All students have name tags that they must wear. If caught without, in my middle school, the teachers first pretend not to know who they are and then force them to wear a handmade nametag if their proper one can’t be found. In larger schools and high schools, the teachers don’t have to pretend, especially if they teach a different grade level. When students are dating—which they aren’t allowed to do in middle school, technically—the boys will give their girlfriends their nametags. It’s sort of like having her wear his class ring, but in the States a guy won’t get in constant trouble for not having it.
The class system is the same, but in junior high and high school in the States students have a locker and move around from classroom to classroom depending on what subject they’re studying. In Japan, the students have a homeroom class, and the teachers move around from classroom to classroom, depending on what class they’re teaching when. Everyone has ten minutes between classes; the students have to have all the materials for their next subject ready at their desk. The staff room is where all of the teachers’ desks are located, and the room next door that also contains the copy machines, a refrigerator, a sink, and places to make coffee or tea, and a long table.
At the beginning and ending of each class the students stand and bow to the teacher. This should be implemented in the States, it’s the best thing ever. In the hallways between classes, the students must also bow and greet the teachers as they walk past. When a student comes to the staff room they must introduce themselves loudly and state from the doorway what they need and why. Then they must excuse themselves and bow properly before leaving. Bowing is a very big cultural expression here, it’s not just the equivalent of a handshake.
At lunch, each class has a group of students in charge of going downstairs to the lunch delivery truck and carrying the pans, plates, food, milk, and ohashi—chopsticks—back up to their classmates, then serve it. There are no cafeterias. Students eat together in their classrooms, in junior high and elementary, and the homeroom teacher eats with the class. If a teacher doesn’t have a homeroom class they eat in the staff room. After lunch the students have twenty minutes to clean up, and whatever time is leftover is their free time.
After school the students clean their classroom, and whatever else that class is assigned to clean that day. There are no janitors. Some argue that this system forces the students to be more neat and tidy, since they’re the ones that will have to clean up after themselves at the end of the day. In some cases this works really well. But there’s always those students that don’t really care one way or another, or like to make trouble for everyone else. Happily, there are only a very few of those in my school.
After school sports are not sports like in the States. They have clubs here, instead. The sports clubs, of course, compete against other schools, and they have district and national matches, but it’s not just sports. They also have a sewing club, an art club, a brass band club, a chorus club, some schools have English clubs and gardening clubs and pretty much anything they can think of. If there are enough students that want to do a certain thing, the school will approve a club for it. I’m pretty sure this stops short of a drinking and smoking club, but everything else is deemed negotiable.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Life of an ALT: Cultural Differences
The first thing I noticed about Japan that was vastly different from my small town of Nowhere Colorado, was the vending machines. Now, Nowhere Colorado has vending machines, of course. We had them at the high school and then one outside the grocery store. Which is about right for a town of two thousand people. Japan? Japan has a vending machine on every street corner. No lie.
There are several different companies for drinks, cigarettes, alcohol, ice cream, junk food, and underwear. And most of them have a vending machine. You think I’m joking about the underwear, but I’m really not. My apartment is situated at a small intersection of a small city, and I have a vending machine within a five minute walk in every direction imaginable. Most of them are for coffee, juice, soda, alcohol and cigarettes. The ones near me, at least. You would think a vending machine that sells alcohol and cigarettes would contradict the age laws against such things, but they have ID readers that make them hard to fool. Supposedly. My Junior High school students still manage to smoke and drink, but teenagers will always find a way. There is nothing more determined and resourceful than a teenager out looking to be bad. That holds true for pretty much the entire world, I would assume. It’s good to know some things are constant.
Next is the living quarters. A one room apartment in the States means one bedroom, and then whatever many rooms for the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and the bathroom. In Japan it means just that. I have one room. It is my bedroom, my living room, and my dining room. I don’t have a kitchen. I have a stove and a sink placed into the wall of my hallway. I do have a bathroom area. The toilet is in its own personal closet, and you wash your hands from a little fountain that spurts water from the top of it when you flush. It actually is sanitary. The shower room and sink is separate. I do mean shower room. It’s an entire room. It has a bathtub in it, but you don’t shower in the bathtub. Confusing? Picture to clarify:
It is also where I dry my clothes. Because while washers are abundant, there is no such thing as a drier. Not unless you’re a pop star. And while I do have a clothes line on my half balcony-that-isn’t, the weather is usually not conducive to drying. It’s either too muggy, and the clothes don’t dry at all, or too cold, and it takes them days. The blower in the shower room isn’t very efficient itself, so I usually have to run it once, then put my clothes in my room draped and hung up on various made-up surfaces with the air conditioner running to get them to dry completely. Sometimes I just go to work in damp clothes. You actually can get used to it.
Once I started drinking—I realize that I say that like I suddenly became an alcoholic…wait, that might be accurate. Well. A social alcoholic at least. Anyway, once I started actually going out drinking with friends, I noticed the lack of real bars. In the States a bar is a bar is a bar. Some serve food, some are part of restaurants, some are just regular bars. It’s almost the same in Japan. Except not.
In Japan, there are a few types of drinking establishments: izakayas, or restaurants that serve alcohol; snack bars, which is basically a hostess bar and the drinks are very expensive, as is the seating charge, but you get your own personal Japanese girl to drink with; shot bars, which is like a regular bar in the States except they serve entirely different snacks and the seating charge can range from roughly five dollars to twenty.
Then there are the nomihodais. A nomihodai is not a bar. It is the best friend of the college student, the alcoholic, the drinking party, and anyone else that wants to drink until they die. It is a drinking buffet. Reallly. A drinking buffet. You pay a set fee, usually anywhere from fifteen dollars to fifty, and you can drink as much as you want, whatever you want—off the nomohodai menu, naturally, but it includes pretty much everything except the high end expensive Sake and Scotch—for ninety minutes to two hours. And when that’s over people usually go to another bar, or to a karaoke nomohodai.
In the culture of Japanese drinking, nothing is as popular as the karaoke nomihodai. Drunken karaoke, are you kidding? They love it here. And as gaijin—Japanese slang for foreigner—we get to love it too. That and pachinko are really the only activities beyond sightseeing where I live. There’s a bowling alley, a skating rink, and parks aplenty. Basically, after work, the regular working class Japanese person goes out with friends and gets completely smashed, then goes home to their families and does more work. They have mastered the art of working hungover and socializing drunk over here. It was perhaps not the best place for me to go, as one with a family history of addiction. Ah well.
There is also the Japanese work ethic. They have nine to five jobs here, of course. Bankers work from about nine to three. All banks close at three here, and are closed on weekends and holidays. If you need to go to the bank and you have a regular job, you’re out of luck. Luckily I have a postal banking account. The post office bank—there is such a thing here—closes at four, but the ATMs are open much later, and you can do pretty much any banking you need through the ATM. Make deposits, withdrawals, transfers, anything. They’re extremely convenient, if you know how to read them. The Post Office ATMs have English, but oddly less banking options on the English menu. The ATMs here are also racist. I am convinced.
And then, of course, there’s the 100 Yen shop. The hyaku en shop is the best invention since tiramisu. Basically, sometimes, a hundred yen equals about a dollar. So the hundred yen shop is really just a dollar store. But it’s not at all like the dollar stores I’m used to.
In the States, you can get cheap plates, ugly figurines, nasty snacks, and nappy decorations at the dollar store. But hey, it’s a dollar, and you get what you pay for, right? In Japan, I’ve probably spent thousands of yen, hundreds of dollars, at the hundred yen shop. You can buy dishes, of course, but some of them are really nice for cheap dishes. You can buy cleaning supplies, containers, notebooks, pens, pencils, toys, decorations, gardening supplies, home repair supplies, stuff for your vehicle, purses, wallets, stickers, bags, luggage, candy, snacks, office supplies, underwear, and just about anything else you can think of. It’s all cheaply made, of course, but true to the Japanese work ethic even cheaply made stuff is of decent usable quality.
I get all of my supplies for school at the hundred yen shop, as well as random cleaning supplies, dish soap, and dishes. Not everything is a hundred yen, of course. The better quality bigger stuff is priced higher, but very few things ever get above a thousand yen—ten bucks.
Then there’re the love hotels. Love hotels are huge here, they’re everywhere. Mostly because it’s traditional for Japanese people to live with their immediate family until they get married, and even then in some cases one spouse will move in with the other’s family. So if anyone wants to get nookie here, they have to use a love hotel. Love hotels are actually fully automated and very discreet. The entrance and exits are completely separate, so you never run into anyone coming or going. The staff hides behind walls until you check out, and if you order from room service they open the door only far enough to set the food on a tray right next to the door. You pay when you exit, since they usually charge by the hour. Some of them are really clean and nice, and some are…well. You can imagine.
There are several different companies for drinks, cigarettes, alcohol, ice cream, junk food, and underwear. And most of them have a vending machine. You think I’m joking about the underwear, but I’m really not. My apartment is situated at a small intersection of a small city, and I have a vending machine within a five minute walk in every direction imaginable. Most of them are for coffee, juice, soda, alcohol and cigarettes. The ones near me, at least. You would think a vending machine that sells alcohol and cigarettes would contradict the age laws against such things, but they have ID readers that make them hard to fool. Supposedly. My Junior High school students still manage to smoke and drink, but teenagers will always find a way. There is nothing more determined and resourceful than a teenager out looking to be bad. That holds true for pretty much the entire world, I would assume. It’s good to know some things are constant.
Next is the living quarters. A one room apartment in the States means one bedroom, and then whatever many rooms for the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and the bathroom. In Japan it means just that. I have one room. It is my bedroom, my living room, and my dining room. I don’t have a kitchen. I have a stove and a sink placed into the wall of my hallway. I do have a bathroom area. The toilet is in its own personal closet, and you wash your hands from a little fountain that spurts water from the top of it when you flush. It actually is sanitary. The shower room and sink is separate. I do mean shower room. It’s an entire room. It has a bathtub in it, but you don’t shower in the bathtub. Confusing? Picture to clarify:
It is also where I dry my clothes. Because while washers are abundant, there is no such thing as a drier. Not unless you’re a pop star. And while I do have a clothes line on my half balcony-that-isn’t, the weather is usually not conducive to drying. It’s either too muggy, and the clothes don’t dry at all, or too cold, and it takes them days. The blower in the shower room isn’t very efficient itself, so I usually have to run it once, then put my clothes in my room draped and hung up on various made-up surfaces with the air conditioner running to get them to dry completely. Sometimes I just go to work in damp clothes. You actually can get used to it.
Once I started drinking—I realize that I say that like I suddenly became an alcoholic…wait, that might be accurate. Well. A social alcoholic at least. Anyway, once I started actually going out drinking with friends, I noticed the lack of real bars. In the States a bar is a bar is a bar. Some serve food, some are part of restaurants, some are just regular bars. It’s almost the same in Japan. Except not.
In Japan, there are a few types of drinking establishments: izakayas, or restaurants that serve alcohol; snack bars, which is basically a hostess bar and the drinks are very expensive, as is the seating charge, but you get your own personal Japanese girl to drink with; shot bars, which is like a regular bar in the States except they serve entirely different snacks and the seating charge can range from roughly five dollars to twenty.
Then there are the nomihodais. A nomihodai is not a bar. It is the best friend of the college student, the alcoholic, the drinking party, and anyone else that wants to drink until they die. It is a drinking buffet. Reallly. A drinking buffet. You pay a set fee, usually anywhere from fifteen dollars to fifty, and you can drink as much as you want, whatever you want—off the nomohodai menu, naturally, but it includes pretty much everything except the high end expensive Sake and Scotch—for ninety minutes to two hours. And when that’s over people usually go to another bar, or to a karaoke nomohodai.
In the culture of Japanese drinking, nothing is as popular as the karaoke nomihodai. Drunken karaoke, are you kidding? They love it here. And as gaijin—Japanese slang for foreigner—we get to love it too. That and pachinko are really the only activities beyond sightseeing where I live. There’s a bowling alley, a skating rink, and parks aplenty. Basically, after work, the regular working class Japanese person goes out with friends and gets completely smashed, then goes home to their families and does more work. They have mastered the art of working hungover and socializing drunk over here. It was perhaps not the best place for me to go, as one with a family history of addiction. Ah well.
There is also the Japanese work ethic. They have nine to five jobs here, of course. Bankers work from about nine to three. All banks close at three here, and are closed on weekends and holidays. If you need to go to the bank and you have a regular job, you’re out of luck. Luckily I have a postal banking account. The post office bank—there is such a thing here—closes at four, but the ATMs are open much later, and you can do pretty much any banking you need through the ATM. Make deposits, withdrawals, transfers, anything. They’re extremely convenient, if you know how to read them. The Post Office ATMs have English, but oddly less banking options on the English menu. The ATMs here are also racist. I am convinced.
And then, of course, there’s the 100 Yen shop. The hyaku en shop is the best invention since tiramisu. Basically, sometimes, a hundred yen equals about a dollar. So the hundred yen shop is really just a dollar store. But it’s not at all like the dollar stores I’m used to.
In the States, you can get cheap plates, ugly figurines, nasty snacks, and nappy decorations at the dollar store. But hey, it’s a dollar, and you get what you pay for, right? In Japan, I’ve probably spent thousands of yen, hundreds of dollars, at the hundred yen shop. You can buy dishes, of course, but some of them are really nice for cheap dishes. You can buy cleaning supplies, containers, notebooks, pens, pencils, toys, decorations, gardening supplies, home repair supplies, stuff for your vehicle, purses, wallets, stickers, bags, luggage, candy, snacks, office supplies, underwear, and just about anything else you can think of. It’s all cheaply made, of course, but true to the Japanese work ethic even cheaply made stuff is of decent usable quality.
I get all of my supplies for school at the hundred yen shop, as well as random cleaning supplies, dish soap, and dishes. Not everything is a hundred yen, of course. The better quality bigger stuff is priced higher, but very few things ever get above a thousand yen—ten bucks.
Then there’re the love hotels. Love hotels are huge here, they’re everywhere. Mostly because it’s traditional for Japanese people to live with their immediate family until they get married, and even then in some cases one spouse will move in with the other’s family. So if anyone wants to get nookie here, they have to use a love hotel. Love hotels are actually fully automated and very discreet. The entrance and exits are completely separate, so you never run into anyone coming or going. The staff hides behind walls until you check out, and if you order from room service they open the door only far enough to set the food on a tray right next to the door. You pay when you exit, since they usually charge by the hour. Some of them are really clean and nice, and some are…well. You can imagine.
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