Japanese Kindergarten is a Concentration Camp
Or perhaps a combination between concentration camp that seems to be in constant revolt. When I first heard I would have to come to this foreign land and teach kindergarten, my blood stopped cold. Andy doesn’t get along with little kids. Even when I was a little kid I didn’t get along with little kids. Lo and behold, “kindergarten” in Futatsui is 子供園, or park of children, if you will. The description is accurate. Kindergarten is not an amalgamation of 5-year olds learning the fundamentals of life like sharing, teamwork, and not sticking fingers where they don’t belong.
Kindergarten here is every kid 0-5 years crammed into a rusted tin barracks and left to devour each other, or anyone else who comes near. True to concentration camp traditions, all the kids are labeled three times (some more, since Japanese have a tendency to write their name on ALL of their clothes)– once on a nametag, once on the bottom of a cloth cap, once on their shoes. All the caps are color coded– pink for one-year olds, orange for two, red for three, yellow for four, blue for five. The age groups are then given class names with harmless things like “Bird Class” for the one-year olds, and animals that can stomp your face in and rip you apart, like “Elephant Class” for the five-year olds. Tom Ridge would like Japanese kindergarten, because the threat level you face before entering the class room is already color coded for your convenience.
Your playground is rusty metal and sand that, when the wind kicks up, tears into your eyes and does its best to strike you blind. There are three sand shovels and three swings for over forty kids– and in place of sharing the rule is might makes right, with the corallary that criers are pussies and ignored. This makes for a lot of happy big kids and a lot of crying little kids, perhaps both learning what their future place will be in Japanese society.
Most kids are allowed to pummel the crap out of each other freely so long as they don’t pummel someone of a different hat color, so long as the pummeling doesn’t result in a spilling of blood.
Now enter into this chaos the foreigner, asked to sacrifice a few hours of his time for the sake of internationalization with these little tykes who comically appeal to you with their cuteness before they engage in their primary mission: ripping you limb from limb. First they try and tire you out by staring five games of simultaneous ‘tag.’ Then they surround you and begin with the psche warfare, each of them asking what a thousand Japanese words are in English non-stop, never listening for an answer and jumping from question to question. When that peters out they go in for the kill with sumo. Contrary to Japanese tradition, sumo is not a one-on-one dance of beauty, but ten-on-one that feels something like wrestling a mutant octopus. The foreigner really only has a couple weapons in his arsenal. He can pray for an intervention from the adult ‘supervision’ (that will unlikely come), or he can cover his eyes and start counting, which triggers the Pavlovian response mechanism in small children that a game of hide and seek has started. They scamper off, the foreigner can now make a safe escape.
Life in the Japanese kindergarten concentration camp isn’t all bad, though. Providing you can survive the morning, you get a decent sized lunch (albeit fed to you in a comically small chair, so that your knees come up to your chin), and the nap time that follows puts all the little demon children to sleep, and envelopes the grounds in a tranquil peace. The contrast between the two– the violent morning and the quiet of the afternoon induces a state of relaxation that is hard to find anywhere else.
My dumb luck, my broken door.
People in glass houses shouldn’t allow other people to “knock” on their door by ramming their bicycle, full speed, into said door.
I believe I heard that saying… or something generally like that… back when I was a wee lad in Ohio. Apparently this saying does not exist in Akita, however, and I found out yesterday the hard way. The good thing about living in a really small town is that everybody knows you. The bad thing, also, is that everybody knows you and knows where you live. They also don’t seem to mind inviting themselves over, which can be great when you need help or company, though not is great when you need privacy.
I have two neighborhood kids who regularly come by to chat and take part in internationalization activities such as pulling weeds or sorting my garbage. Though both of them can, at times, be more of a handful than helpful, there hearts are very much in the right place. Whether by virtue of being excited that his foreign friend was home early yesterday, or whether riding the wind of a colossal brain fart, it was much to my shock as I was coming downstairs to see behind the frosted glass of my front door a fast approaching bicycle. That didn’t slow down.
Realization of what’s about to happen.
Scream.
Crash.
Bicycle tire poking out of frosted glass into my genkan, surrounded in perfect silence.
Now here’s where my dumb luck comes in. Of all the people who could have run into my glass door and broken it, I was fortunate that it was a kid with a sense of right and wrong. The door was well busted, so that I couldn’t open it, and he could just as easily ridden away in terror. But he stayed, and waited as I came out from the side door to my house. He knew he was in trouble and waited until the BoE arrived (as they owned the house) and told them exactly what happened. That night I had a meeting out of town, but his parents had come by and left a written apology at my house. I won’t have to pay to replace the door, and all is right with the world. Nobody went nuts, got defensive, or tried to take advantage of the situation. And, for once, the BoE was on the ball and acted to resolve the situation quickly.
I woke up this morning to a repairman ready to take my door and replace in half an hour.
A Deficit of Faith
Akita gets the least amount of sun in Japan, has some of the most snow, some of the worst infrastructure, and the highest suicide rate in a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the industrialized world. Where places are at their most miserable, the population is typically ripe for indoctrination. Perhaps the most difficult thing to understand about a place like this is the faith. Shinto and Buddhism have a healthy co-existence, but both exist for many as a matter of tradition and superstition– Shinto kami are prayed to in order to make the deities happy (so as to bless your new car, or simply not to meddle in your affairs), and Buddhism teaches you that life is all about suffering and the path to enlightenment is littered with introspection and philosophy.
As a religion, these things can offer to their followers answers to some of the big questions– but the journey is often left to the individual. What is missing is the often therapeutic effect a faith community can have in supporting the faithful. The result is that while religion still has a place in Japanese life, spiritually satisfying experiences run few and far between. At times like these the soul will grab at anything it can get its hands on to make up the difference in this deficit of faith. This leads me to my experience yesterday.
I was e-mailed in April from an ex-(and also young)-eikaiwa student saying she wanted to meet and talk and introduce me to her English speaking friend. No harm in that, I thought to myself. We eventually arranged to meet yesterday afternoon. We were to meet at a roadside break area (already a little odd), and it was a few days earlier that I had learned that her English-speaking friend couldn’t make it. Not having another person there was perhaps the best way that this could have happened.
We sat down and she began immediately prodding into my religious background. Having grown up next to Jehovah’s Witnesses for a portion of my childhood, I saw little alarms starting turning on in my head. I knew where this was going. But still, I had driven myself to this place, I may as well stay to hear the sales pitch. I was told I could be happy, and if I already felt happy I could be happier. I was told that because Galileo outsmarted a bunch of narrow-minded priests in the Middle Ages that Galileo had succeeded in outsmarting God Himself (not sure how this fit into her Buddhist sect, as I don’t recall Galileo being Buddhist, but whatever. I was informed that I was lucky I wasn’t born a cat, because only humans had the chance to achieve the Enlightenment she was offering. I was given a book thicker than my JET General Information Manual and a few of the cult’s newspapers. After ranting about how happy I could be for another 30 minutes I was told that in death I would be so happy my body wouldn’t undergo rigor mortis and stiffen, I could live forever in a pretty white world with a beautiful body!
I asked if this meant I would be a zombie. I was assured this was not the case.
At this point my former acquaintance informed me that all this happiness and joy could be mine if I underwent 25 minute ritual (to which she was sketchy) in an unknown location. The sole path to Enlightenment could finally be mine!
She then had the backbone (or nuttiness) to claim that this entire faith was based on the precepts of science.
Sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to undergo this Enlightenment. There are no shortcuts to peace of mind and there is no guru who can sell you enough metaphors to find happiness.
And to quote my ex-acquaintance’s oddly inspired Galileo:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
She also claimed there was no way her faith was online, but alas, it is (albeit somewhat resembling a glorified geocities site):
NOW HEAR THIS!!
I am, indeed, going to be a buckeye lawyer. I rendered my official decision on April 1st– sending my scholarship and seat acceptance letters from a Tokyo post office. I never thought for a second that I’d find myself back in Ohio to study– but such is life that we don’t know necessarily where it will lead us, nor how it will lead us there. Despite having sent out my mail on April Fool’s Day, I’m confident I made the right decision. It will be interesting to see how much culture shock I suffer being at home after all this time over here.
As for everything else in life– things are going okay. I came back to Akita yesterday morning, did some badly needed spring cleaning/mail sending, and like clockwork one of my neighborhood students came by in the afternoon to welcome me back from spring break. The big teacher switch has finally taken place at me schools, and thankfully one of the Tweedle-Dee/Tweedle Dum pair of English teachers at my base school finally moved out. Sadly, it was Tweedle-Dee, but nevertheless with one of them gone it clears a lot of air and gives some hope that maybe (just maybe) the English department at this school will finally act like an English department again. For the last two years, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum refused to speak to each other, essentially making collaboration on anything impossible and causing two very well-qualified teachers to up and leave as soon as they could. Tweedle-Dee has been replaced by a young guy fresh out of college, meaning he has slightly more in common with me than with Tweedle-Dum.
Futatsui also has a new Kocho sensei, who I have yet to get a good read on– but I’m doubtful he’ll surpass my blood of former samurai who lives with his mom and has a bed time kocho who took me skiing, attempted to teach me drunken mahjong by reserving the entire upstairs to Daikon-te, and never made snide “Hashi joozu” comments at me. He preferred to be more aggressive, opting instead to say I was never going to be Japanese unless I ate natto.
A statement to which I gladly agreed.
The best laid plans of mice and men…
I could spend this post griping about how my spring vacation plans blew up in my face and I didn’t even get out of Honshu, but I won’t. I’ve spent sufficient time in mourning over that loss. I will say I’m very happy for my family, and for my friends the Matsumoto’s in Kyoto, for without them I really would have been a mess and had nowhere to go.
I am indeed a very lucky person.
That said, this spring vacation was spent in the warm confines of Kyoto, resting and getting an early peek at the cherry blossoms in Osaka.
Perhaps the unofficial word for the month of March would be ‘plan.’ Or, perhaps it is just that I am standing closer and closer to a new starting line in my life, and planning has become more a necessity than an option.
I managed to plan my spring and Golden Week vacations. I didn’t plan, mind you, for my spring vacation to self-destruct, but so be it.
I also didn’t plan to meet a good friend– someone who I’d forgotten about for two years because I’d mistakenly thought she’d moved to Sendai. She’s helped restore my faith in Japanese young people, or at least proved that some Japanese young people in Akita actually care about what goes on outside Tohoku and outside Japan.
I didn’t plan to consider The Ohio State University for law school, although I applied there. Given the circumstances I plan to go there now, though. And the more I read about it, the better I feel.
I plan to do a lot more in my dwindling days here.
Invading my Wallet and Privacy
If I walk with an odd limp this week, it’s because my wallet is several pounds lighter now having gone through the car examination (車検) experience. The good news is that I feel as though I came out on top of the whole ordeal. My previous two vehicles were virtually un-shakenable.
There was The White Blight, which sounded like a jet engine flaring just before take-off whenever you tapped the brakes. The side mirror was held on by electrical tape. It was listed by Claire Leary as “The most dangerous car I have ever been in.” I wear that badge or pride with honor.
Then there was The Maroon Balloon, my cute little K-car with a turbo engine that hummed like a golf cart but moved like a white plate car. It became un-shakenable when the frame of the car actually snapped while I was driving it. It also had a nice 6CD changer music apparatus which I remember fondly.
Now I have The Green Machine. An nice Subaru Impreza that is actually big enough to hold people and safe enough to drive them somewhere. Minus a few dings, it’s actually in good condition. The car salesman attempted to sell it to me for 30万, a pretty penny which I didn’t have. The 30万 price tag came with the assumption that he would do the car examination for me at the time I bought it (October). The car examination was in March. I politely informed him that paying for a car exam six months early was crazy and if I accidentally totalled my car (or, say, the frame should snap in half while I was driving it), I’d be out a lot of money. I said I’d take of the car exam myself and got the car for 10万. The Green Machine passed 車検 yesterday with flying colors and only (ONLY?) cost me 9万. Still expensive, but much cheaper than the 30万 price offered by my car dealer. It was still certainly cheaper than buying another car. Score.
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I also finally had another ‘first’ in this country last week. I was finally stopped by a police officer. I wasn’t speeding. I wasn’t even in my car. I wasn’t harrassing a group of innocent Japanese women or defacing public property. I was walking down the street. I was asked for my passport several times– to which I instead produced my Japanese Driver’s License and, eventually, 外人Card. While I would have rather engaged the officer in a friendly discourse on how incredibly undemocratic it is to just stop a random white person on the street and ask for their papers, the 99% conviction rate and horror stories of arrested foreigners encouraged me to think again.
I simply stuck with some snide comments: “Japan must be a really safe place if you have the kind of free time to just stop people on the streets. Must be really boring for you, huh?”
I’m glad my Japanese has progressed to the level where I can say these kind of things and not worry about something getting lost in translation and me being thrown in prison.
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On a lighter side of things, I attended the most efficient graduation ceremony ever on Sunday. It was a graduation I actually wanted to go to (perhaps the perk of having 14 schools is the liberty of being able to pick). It was over fast and I got to wish off a group of 3rd years who won over my heart and actually worked hard to be friends with the foreigner. Some kids actually cried at my last class and there were plenty of hugs and photos taken at graduation. They’re a group I’m gonna miss.
How to Kill Your JTE
All you need to know are two syllables: Juku. The very mention of the Japanese cram school system (塾) has an interesting way of disettling English teachers in the public school system. It’s odd, really. Whenever juku comes up in conversation, most of my English teachers act more uncomfortable than if I had suddenly decided to talk about Nanking or attempted to deny Hiroshima had ever happened.
In my first year as an ALT, I was actually scolded for teaching students the English term we have for juku– cram school– in class. I was never given a good reason as to why. Agreed, ‘cram school’ conjures an image of studying hard merely to put things into your short-term memory banks the night before a test. It’s not a very flattering image, but you’d think the Japanese would like the implication that even their youth ‘cram,’ work hard, and do overtime for the good of themselves and the country. Perhaps the JTE was afraid the students would misprounce the ‘r’ and claim they were going to clam school– leaving all foreigners scratching their heads as to why so many Japanese work so hard to understand the complex world of shellfish.
Long story short, I was instructed that we shouldn’t teach the term ‘cram school,’ we should just teach the term ‘juku.’ An exclusively Japanese word for an English class. As an English speaker, ‘juku’ means nothing to me.
To tell the truth, I don’t think ‘cram’ was the problem. The problem JTE’s seem to have with juku is the ‘school’ part. School is their domain– it’s where their authority and power, and respect, rests. American teachers get very little respect, unless they earn it. Growing up, I had teachers I respected (Mr. Smith, Mrs. Biehl, Mrs. Groat), but I certainly had teachers who I didn’t respect whatsoever. Japanese teachers (especially in a small community), are more like minor celebrities and are imbued with deferential respect, whether earned or not. They don’t have to do anything to get this respect, save for passing the teacher’s examination which, in fairness is quite hard. Still, their respect and status is anchored by being an actual teacher in an actual school. Cram schooling, however, doesn’t have this ‘exclusive club’ feel to it, though plenty of instructors have had exposure or perhaps even taught in the public education system.
The reason my teachers react to the discussion of ‘juku’ as though they were a vampire and I was holding a crucifix to their face is because ‘juku’ serves as a reminder: they have competition. The tax-payer funded impossible-to-fire public school employee has to deal with competition. And the competition is winning. My ‘juku’ kids outperform non-juku kids hands down. Even in first-year students, it’s easy to tell which kids are going to a cram school within the first month. They know how to study, they know how to take tests, and the know how to learn.
I have never seen study skills, or study suggestions, taught in a Japanese public school classroom. The kids seem to get the same vanilla advice in nearly every school– write lots of random words down in your notebook, copy sentences ad nauseum from the textbook, and you may learn English. Of course, some students actually buy into this, and find themselves shocked and frustrated after a year goes by and the still know next to nothing. This sort of thing is something only possible when it’s impossible to lose customers. You can’t drop out of compulsary education, and you can’t change schools unless you move. A teacher can get away with doing almost nothing.
A juku teacher has to produce results, and has to get the kid learning– the juku teacher has customers, paying customers, who can choose another cram school quite easily. In the real world, money talks. In the public school world, the money is guaranteed, so why bother? You’ll catch more hell by not keeping up with your paperwork or managing the club correctly than if you do no more than lecture about English grammar for ten minutes and then pass out a worksheet.
Juku, by its very existence, highlights the shortcomings of public education here.
(Small disclaimer: I do have some great English teachers who do go out of their way to help students learn, and how do their best to give every kid a shot. I can’t say whether or not they’re in the majority though. Public school teachers also have to deal with: the PTA, adminstrators who think they know how things should be taught, kids who don’t want to be there, ridiculous kinds of paperwork, and all sorts of other hogwash that comes with a public institution.)
I must have been here too long…
… or at least this is the only explanation I can think of… to explain… why when I look at foreigner blogs lampooning Japanese food oddities… I… get…
HUNGRY!
Foreigners living in Japan (esp. Americans) see fit to pollute the internet stratosphere with their drivel about life in a foreign land. I very enthusiastically include myself in this category, publishing not only a crappy blog, but a crap blog through perhaps the East St. Louis of the blogging world. Really, xanga is polluted with high schoolers and middle-aged women, and my presence remaining here is more an indicator of my abject laziness and less my desire to appeal to said audience. Anyway, I digress.
It seems to be a rite of passage to take the piss out of Japanese food, and boy the Japanese really couldn’t make it any easier. The same culinary pallette that gave birth to iron chef also seems to prefer senbei that taste like cardboard to the golden voluptuousness of Ritz, processed flavorless cheese to the real stuff, and danger foods like mochi and moyashi (bean sprouts) that seem to make it their goal to grow arms and cling to the walls of my throat.
NOTE: When choking on mochi, it is standard Japanese practice to dislodge the gooey rice paste via a vacuum cleaner. I am not joking.
But, by and large, foreign bloggers stay away from these dastardly food items and choose to berate the usual suspects: raw things, natto, octopi, and urchin.
Sadly, with the exception of natto, all of these things make my mouth water (or at least have a special place reserved in my stomach). At the bar, I’m usually the first (and often only) one to order the octopus sashimi. Why? Well, it’s chewy. In fact, the time spent consuming this fruit of the sea is long enough that the chew-to-yen ratio is astounding. At the end, from all the chewing you end up feeling fuller than you are, which is great if you’re trying to cut back on your caloric intake.
“Octopus… it’s like fish flavored gum!”
A local converted me to urchin appreciation. While it’s got a boogery texture, it melts like wet sand in your mouth and slides down without much argument. It’s also worth noting that sea urchin is literally the gall bladder of the sea, kanji-wise: 海胆, which means you can tell people you eat ocean gall-bladder, which sounds way grosser than the reality of eating sea urchin, thereby amplifying your bragging rights beyond comprehension.
I’m a fan of the raw horse as well, and can see how it goes well with beer. I have made efforts to understand the gaijin complaint against 馬刺, but just can’t seem to wrap my mind around it. The argument seems to be : “Raw meat, ewww.” It’s hard to argue against that with logic, especially since most folks (including myself) were raised to instinctively think: “Raw meat, ewww.” Arguably though, many Americans who initially think “Raw fish, ewww,” can (and do) come to like sushi. Raw meat is just another step up the ladder. And, it’s worth noting from a moral standpoint that the Japanese aren’t solely guilty for their consumption of Mr. Ed. The #1 exporter of horse meat to Japan is those crazy Canucks up in Canada. Perhaps it would be best to imagine Dudley-Do-Right without the horse.
That said, natto is still an evil creation that I could only imagine starving North Korean peasants consuming for lack of rocks or other more tasty things. But I’ve met plenty of foreigners who can eat it and kudos to them.
There are, really, much more nasty culinary evils than the usual suspects in Japan, all of which I gave due process and at least attempted to put in my mouth, but still get a deserving やっぱり、ダメだ Award, and I will list them below. But in fairness, I encourage you to at least try them first. That way, we can all laugh at you.
Fried Cartelidge なんこつ
Coming from a country with fried chicken, fried oreos, fried steak, and fried ice cream… you’d eventually come to the conclusion that frying makes anything better. Alas, なんこつ is perhaps the Jesus-fish of fried foods, disproving the maxim by its very existence.
Fried fish spine, however, goes well with a drink.
Pork Spine 豚のなんこつ
Think of deli pork, shaped like pepperoni, with two blocks of cartelidge in the middle. Served cold. Unlike the rest of these dishes, which I either spat out or swalled entirely, this one took one bite, and I knew it was bad news.
Whale 鯨
If it’s endangered and it tastes bad, why do you eat it? I’ve tried it once at an enkai and once at a bar. At the enkai it was in miso-soup and it tasted like balls of slimy fat. At the bar it came as postage-stamp sized sashimi and tasted akin to tuna (which costs the same and comes in bigger portions). Perhaps it was useful post-war when everyone was starving– but your money could go towards something more delicious that doesn’t involve killing Willy.
Fish Bones 骨
Something with no flavor AND the risk of accidentally impaling itself on my gum is never worth eating. If you want calcium, drink milk.
and lest we not forget…
The Cup of Live F#$%ing Fish
It sounds like a fraternity hazing ritual, but I swear to you it exists. If the “Eww… its raw,” reflex is hard to overcome, I encourage you to try and take down your “WTF… it’s still alive!” reflex. Because it is… still… alive. A small school of minnow-sized fish enclosed in a sake cup of water. According to the Japanese, it apparently feels “good” to feel them slither down your esophogus and play (read: die in writhing agony) in your stomach acid.
I tried to be friendly and wait until my fish were comatose before throwing them into my mouth. They weren’t on my tongue for more than a second before they sprang back to life and started kicking around in a bid for freedom.
The good news is the fish won, and became the first Japanese ‘food’ I have ever spat back out.
The bad news is the woman next to me had almost 20 cups of said fish. Though I guess throwing that many fish into your stomach is marginally cheaper than housing them in an aquarium.
王指道 The Way of the Thumb
Perhaps its just because I have to spend the majority of my time around young people living in the middle of nowhere with nothing better to do, but my time here has taught me myriad lessons on how exactly to execute a thumb war. When I was a kid, I remember a thumb war mostly just being a couple of wrist flicks and thumb taunts until someone got pinned.
Here, or at least in Futatsui, the thumb war is a full contact sport that determines social rank, who gets first dibs at school lunch, and, possibly, whether or not you go on to high school. I would like to include below my unofficial list of thumb war tactics, in the hope that you don’t get pwned in your next encounter.
The Pearl Harbor— as it implies… an outright sneak attack. Take their thumb out before the ref. says go and start counting. Your opponent will protest your dirty trick, at least until you’ve counted all the way up to six, when they start struggling to get free.
The Tag Team— this seems to be the tactic used by most Japanese. Use your index finger to push your opponents’ thumb down and then go for the pin.
The ‘Te-Hiki-Sakusen’— my personal favorite, which has one me many a match. Yank their hand. Hard. If you catch them off guard enough, they hand will by down by your side. Your opponent will be thinking more about their hand, and less about their thumb. This will lead to an easy pin.
The Blackout— Pull their hand toward you and turn your body into their arm, placing yourself between their body and their hand. This tactic blocks their field of vision and can lead to an easier pin.
The Corkscrew— Twist your wrist inward so that your thumbs are facing down and towards you. This, again, blocks vision and also gives you a small leverage advantage.
The Sandwich— manuever your opponent and clamp their body against the wall. If you can clamp their arm against the wall and restrict their movement, even better.
The Bleeding Palm— grow out your fingernails and dig them into your oppoenents’ palm during battle as a distraction and to increase pain and frustration. (They don’t *ACTUALLY* draw blood, mind you. But I actually do have students who use their nails to this advantage.)
The “Hey, Look Over There!”— it sounds lame, but in a low-level school you’d be amazed at how many kids fall for this. And you’d be even more amazed at how many times they fall for this in succession. Distract, push their thumb down with their free hand, and pin. Game, Set, Match– albeit totally unfair.
This, my readers, is the Way of the Thumb. Follow these simple strategies and no punk will stand in your path. I currently only lose to one student. But to be fair, that student is a freak of nature whose palms naturally grease themselves when a thumb war commences, and has clearly been walking the 王指道 for longer than I.
A Flurry of Results
I have gotten my first law school rejection and honestly, I couldn’t be happier. It sounds odd, true, but I think if I’d managed an acceptance to every law that I applied to, I’d somehow feel as though I hadn’t aimed high enough. With my GWU rejection letter in hand, that is no longer a problem. I still stand admitted to three law schools, one of which offered money with the acceptance letter. For the other two I am still awaiting for financial information. I now know where I want to go, it’s just a question of time and money.
The rejection and my stubborn knee are the only bad news I’ve had to bear lately, though. Well, that and shaken is next month. But that’s next month’s bad news! Let’s not get into that just yet.
The good news, though, is pouring forth by the bucketload. Winter took a break last week, but seems to have returned to Akita today. Hopefully by the end of the week there will be a new layer of snow in the mountains upon which to ski. At the very least, the new snow will help keep the night ski place open in case I get the urge to ski somewhere easy while my leg heals.
I’m having dinner tomorrow. On Valentine’s Day. With a female. No romantic intentions, just a meeting of friends, but still it’s nice to be able to say that. It’s certainly better than the Valentine’s Day Eve where I told a girl, rather bluntly, that I didn’t love her. I didn’t know what day it was at the time, though. You’d think a person with my brain pan could figure out to look at a freakin’ calendar. Alas, no.
Perhaps the best news of all– I passed the 2Kyuu Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I have yet to figure out how I managed this. Oddly enough kanji was my lowest score, even though I feel like I know less grammar than I do kanji. Regardless, it feels nice to have passed a test that actually means something in terms of ability. Maybe after another decade of suffereing through the next 1000 Chinese characters, I can aspire to 1Kyuu.
Land-Bound-Lawyer 