I signed the contract to stay for a third year last week. Staying one more will allow me to see the students who came in the same year I did graduate; it’s an opportunity to see a full educational cycle from beginning to end. My studies, my personal connections with these kids, my growing comfort with life here–everything seems to emphasize that staying is the right thing to do.

Still, the job itself is no challenge, not anymore, not really. And if I’m going to put in another year, I’m going to need a challenge. So I’ve decided to take learning Japanese completely seriously this year. I have low intermediate proficiency, but I still feel barely literate most of the time. I want competency. Competency, according to all the truly fluent foreigners, can take years and years.

And so, in the spirit of hell-for-leather, needing-a-challenge endeavor, I’ve gone full immersion. I’ve gotten rid of all English books, movies and music. I’ve started taking my research notes in Japanese. I’ve purchased a monolingual dictionary. It’s not exactly cold turkey; I still conduct conversation classes and communicate with friends and family back home in English. But it’s damn near close. I’ve ramped up the study, and cut off the flow of escapism. I’ve got one year left in this country. I’m going to throw everything I’ve got at this language and see how far I can get.

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Headed out to the Thailand tonight, so I’ll be offline for a few weeks. Latest update says they’ve arranged sleeping mats on an open-air houseboat for all the volunteers during their time at the orphanage. How cool is that?

I was going to do this epic, doing-good-and-taking-names post before I left; I had it all planned out. But I’m not in the mood this morning. So I think I’ll write about the new yogurt Pepsi flavor instead.

Saw Pepsi White for the first time in the convenience store last night. The “ice cucumber” flavor Tripp talked about back in January is long gone by now. Japan is serious about keeping things seasonal, and cucumber is a summer flavor. Besides, I’ve noticed that when they say “limited edition” here, they mean it. Not like in America, where corporations often change their stand on temporary/permanent releases at the drop of a hat according to consumer demand. Mountain Dew LiveWire comes to mind; I seem to remember that being a limited edition flavor when I was teaching in Baltimore, years on years ago. But there it was, still on the shelves when I visited home this summer.

But hey, Pepsi White. It was okay. Not bad, not great. I definitely liked the cucumber flavor better. But by now my palate has adopted cultural relativism; I’m no longer any sort of judge. So for a more solidly western perspective (and a picture), you can find the AV Club review here.

The bit that made me laugh the most, aside from the “Jim Crow” line and a few of the quotes at the bottom:

There was little to no cola taste, which is surprising, since it’s billed as “Pepsi & yogurt.” (Unless in Japan, that translates to “no Pepsi and no yogurt.”)

For the record, it does.

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We got our re-contracting papers this week. I’ll have to decide in the next several weeks whether I want to extend for an additional year here in Kochi, or leave once my contract expires in August. It also means that it’s open season for students, parents, colleagues, and friends to start asking me about my plans to go or stay, and quiz me about the status of my life in Japan. In other words, the pressure’s on; until I do make an official decision, I will need to be very careful and polite in my responses to questions on this subject.

Last year I had no hesitation, and I’m very glad I extended for a second year. A third year? I just don’t know. (Hell of a time for the “Magic 8-Ball” to be out of commission, actually.)

I truly love the kids I’m working with, and would very much like to see them graduate–something I could do if I extended. Living here is continually interesting and energizing. My cost of living is minimal, and the opportunities I have to explore and travel are legion. But the job itself is not much of a challenge. I am, in effect, creating work for myself on a regular basis so that I have something new to work on. In addition to this work, my regular responsibilities have increased over time, as has my reputation. But it’s still pretty slow going at times. I miss having full control of what I can do in a room, being able to attack an idea head-on in my own way; I miss the sharp back-and-forth I can have with students in my native language. It seems totally insane to be talking about missing 70/80-hour work weeks, but I do. I do miss them. And I miss the more regular contact I had with my friends Stateside, as well.

We leave for Thailand on Friday. I’m thinking it’ll be a good place and time to think things through, a way to (literally) get some distance and try to figure out where I stand.

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This being my second year on this job, it’s becoming more and more easy to notice trends. Last October as well as this one, I was feeling pretty miserable and pointless. It’s a time when my colleagues and students are so busy and preoccupied with preparing for school festivals that the help I can offer never seems to be worth the extra time it takes to explain things to me (in English or Japanese, sadly). And though I’ve gotten much better at being able to just jump in and help without explanation, it’s still a lonely world when you can’t really be part of the team.

Looking at all this has made me aware of just how much I depend on feedback, verbal or nonverbal, to establish a sense of accomplishment. And how important a sense of capability, of having done things well, has become to my sense of self. I’m not talking about compliments, even. I’m talking about a certain vibe you get when you’re talking shop with someone, a sense that the person in question knows what your job is and knows that you can and will do the job you are given to do. It’s a sort of respect, that faith in your competence. Something I have apparently taken for granted up to now.

When my day is full, and the responsibilities I have are mine alone, I can see for myself how things are getting done. But when my job is to help other people, the picture becomes less clear. It’s standard procedure in Japan to compliment foreigners a lot–it’s thought that compliments are a way to make people feel welcome–but these compliments often have little to do with real performance feedback. Even now my colleagues still compliment me at least once a week on my ability to use chopsticks and make my own lunch, but no one will ever say a word about how one of my classes went. I can’t brainstorm freely with anyone to improve my teaching, and I can’t offer too many observations on what I see outside of a formal evaluation meeting. I find, especially in October, that I really miss that kind of idea exchange.

I was talking to an Australian friend of mine about this not too long ago. He said that it’s a cultural thing. People, especially in the workplace, are very careful not to comment on other people’s performance or lack thereof. He worked in a position like mine for over three years before he received any sort of actual feedback about the job he was doing. Still, I’m glad all the festivals are over, and November is here again. Things are already looking up.

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Because we all agree now that I’m on some kind of theme here:
sex and flirting in Japan

My favorite part is how taking a shower is essentially code for ‘let’s have sex.’

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it’s so strange.

super tuesday is only the vaguest blip on the radar here, a 30-second spot on the evening news crammed in with other, similar bits on chad, kenya, the protests against japanese whaling. (actually, the bit about the japanese whaling was somewhat longer; only to be expected on a japanese news program, i suppose.) in any case, nobody asked about voting or elections today, even the teachers who usually talk with me about current events. it just wasn’t there.

meanwhile, going to any american news source online is like looking into this whole other world, full of stridency and mad speculation. full articles devoted to a given celebrity’s endorsement of one candidate or another. detailed descriptions of what everybody did on monday night. polls analyzed and reanalyzed. from this distance, it feels almost too huge to be real. and for the first in a long time, i’m getting a sense of just how far ‘this distance’ is–on more than one level.

for me, super tuesday is all but over; i should have gone to bed hours ago.
over at tripp’s house, the show is just beginning.

good luck, everyone.

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one really cool thing about working ESL is the high entertainment value of your students’ mistakes. tonight erin and i grabbed a pile of uncorrected papers and headed down to the noodle joint for a working dinner session. the intent was to talk some shop and do some grading over oolong tea and chinese-style ramen; and to be fair, some of that did get done. but we kept getting diverted, interrupting each other every so often to read out some of the funnier sentences and have a mutual crack-up. guilty pleasure, to be sure, but good times nonetheless.

my current favorite, from one of erin’s kids, trying to give a reason why he prefers one type of cookie over another–

“Is not a hand stained when I disintegrate?”

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