EIL Intercultural Learning

Nah. It can't be. It has NOT been over a week since I last posted! Because if that were true (which would be ABSURD), that'd mean that I'm over halfway through my trip! Which means I'm getting deported in under 3 weeks! :-O

Since we all agree that that CANNOT POSSIBLY be the case, let's continue on under the assumption that it is now... Friday! Friday the 23rd of July! So what has happened in the FIVE DAYS since I've last posted? Well, I've turned 18 (still a minor in Japan, which means that I have ABSOLUTELY NOT BEEN DRINKING. Nope. Nuh-uh. Any photos I upload of the birthday itself will totally NOT have been Photoshopped, as a result), finished high school (again!), and eaten natto! If you don't get the reference, Google it and you'll see why I mention it! Westerners are supposed to hate it, possibly because the Japanese love it. I, for one, am undecided.

That's all FASCINATING, but the point of this blog is not to regail you with the wonderfully MUNDANE aspects of life in Japan (exotic as they may seem), but to tell you about the ULTRA mundane! The daily grind! THE SCHOOL.

The day I arrived in Japan, just a few hours after meeting my host family, I was told that I had school in the morning. Yeah, right. So I collapsed on the futon in a graceful heap - but woke at 6am to find out two things:

1) I had not, in fact, slipped into a coma for the past few months; I did actually win a trip to Japan, even though it took me a moment to remember, and

2) My host family had not, in fact, been joking. I had just graduated from secondary school to find myself going to JUNIOR HIGH.

In Japan, schools are structured a little differently from ours. Compulsory education starts at 6, not 5 (but most children go to preschools called youchien, anyway), and what we call secondary school is segregated into middle school and high school. Middle school is from 12 - 14 (ish), and high school is from 15 - 17 years old (ish). I was assigned to a third year class (pre-Junior Certs... wahey...), introduced briefly to the staff at large, and left alone. Thankfully, a few students were assigned to keep an eye on me and show me where the classes were!

The next day I became a second year, and a first year the day after that (12 years old again! Wow. I lost literally one third of my lifespan in three days. Maybe I'll do it again when I'm sixty.) After that I entered HIGH SCHOOL - still a first year, mind. Can't say it wasn't intimidating - for both parties! Japan is, despite what they say, both a very large and very homogenous society. There is less thatn a 1% foreign population to the best of my knowledge, and let's not get started on the Korean situation... Google it if you're curious. Seeing as I'm still in Japan atm, posting my opinion would not be... tactful.

But yes, foreigners stick out, as I've mentioned before. In school, the middle school first years were the best, in my opinion. They were young enough to see me as a novelty, and therefore had the confidence to chat with me in Japanese, a little. As you move upwards through the school grades, the students become more reserved, until you hit high school! That's not to say they weren't friendly - they were, provided they chose to be. Generally speaking (what a terrible phrase to use on a cultural website), Japanese social strata can be divided into one's in-group and out-group. It is the in-group with which the famous Japanese politeness is most closely associated. Until you break into that inner group, you are generally treated with indifference, or at times even rudeness. Which resulted in my generally getting tired of trying to make conversation for two people and reading a book from the library instead.

HOWEVER, this phenomenon applies in no way to those Japanese students who have done homestays abroad (a surprisingly large group). On my second day, some second-year students came straight up to me and started talking to me in English! I was shocked, to say the least. No-one had done anything like that since I'd arrived! After school we went for a walk around town, and I had my first experience of purikura (Print Club), a truly Japanese phenomenon! Japanese teenagers would be considered... childish, perhaps, by Western standards: it is completely normal for 17 year olds to have a bright pink flashing phone, a fan covered with Disney characters and no more than a passing interest (or knowledge) of alcohol. But I digress.

Anyway, the two girls wouldn't let me pay! And for our 600 yen (I think...) we got a string of hilarious photos for us to stick on whatever. Some girls keep purikura photo diaries. Then, at the station, we enjoyed the free footbath while I tried to explain the differences between Irish and Japanese schools. Between my poor Japanese and their great English we were able to have a decent conversation! Which was nice. :)

You might find it strange that I remark on the students' English ability: all Japanese students study English from twelve years of age. However, very little class time (usually none) is taken up with oral practice. In fact, most Japanese classes are entirely lecture-style, with little student-teacher interaction. As a student, I could see the benefits: we were free to nap (as we often did), and I often read books or studied from my own textbook (only true geeks bring their Japanese textbooks on holidays!), or even went to the library, where there was an enourmous English-language Japanese encyclopedia, and a stack of Time magazines. You might think I was being lazy - and certainly sometimes I was - but apart from maths, chemistry and English, 99% of what the teachers said went straight over my head.

The first day I was in high school, I was invited by the English teacher to talk to the class. I'd had some practice at this in the middle school, where I helped the English teachers with their classes, so I rattled off prepared self-introduction and talked a little about Ireland, accompanied (at the teacher's request) by a (highly *cough* accurate) map drawn on the blackboard! Yes, blackboard: chalk and cassette-recorders are the staples of Japanese schools. Anyway, the students were amazed when I started writing the names of a few cities in Japanese, and even more taken aback when I (showing off) wrote a few phrases in kanji on the board. The fact that I got some wrong was of no consequence. Though, as anyone who goes to Japan will tell you, the Japanese LOVE to pile praise on foreigners. If I can tell you my age, name and nationality, I am fluent. If I know the names of a few Japanese festivals I am a true scholar. And so on. It was later explained to me by a Canadian teacher as a side-effect of the inbuilt striving for harmony possessed by all (and I mean all) Japanese: they will say whatever they can to put you at ease. A little bit harsh, in my opinion, but true nonetheless. And that is yet ANOTHER stereotype that I've created...

Yet again, I digress! After my spiel, and a re-iteration in English, I asked the class did they have any questions. Thirty blank faces stared back at me. At length, someone asked me a question (it was the student assigned to look after me), and after some prodding from the teacher I got a second question, something about sports. Then I talked some more, translating from Japanese to English. Still nothing from the students. I was not asked to talk to the class again. Oral Communication, a separate class, was not, in fact, speaking practice, but (written) practice at conversational PHRASES. Though the focus on individual, unrelated sentences and not their use in any kind of context worried me.

I may sound overly critical of both the Japanese and their schools. Perhaps I am: but when a student can tell me whether every individual word in a sentence is a subject, predicate, modifier, subordinate clause or intransitive verb, and yet not be able to tell me what the sentence MEANS, something is badly wrong. It dates back to the when Perry and his crew first landed in Japan, I think: the Emperor of the time did not ask his people to fight, but a few years later made English education compulsory. However, he stipulated that it should never be spoken, only written. While the mandate has faded, the rationale has not: as a result, most students graduate from high school with an extremely high level of written comprehension in English, but little to no proficiency in actual conversation.

But. And this is a big but. All of this is offset (at least in part) by the wonderful creation known as after-school clubs. Nearly every student is a member of one, many join several. There are en enormous variety of clubs - everything from calligraphy to classical guitar, baseball to English debate - and all are entirely student-run. The school has no direct input into the clubs at all. Only at the English club was a teacher even present, and that was because he was a Canadian teacher, and was invited to attend by the students. Never would most principals in Ireland dream of doing anything like that! Even the sports teams are managed by students (though there were one or two adults co-managing, presumably organising things that the students, being underage, couldn't legally do). The structure of the clubs is based on the senpai-kohai relationship (Senior-Junior relationshp) which, I am told, is seen throughout much of Japanese society; anywhere there is a chain of more experienced and less experienced colleagues. Younger students respect and defer to senpai, and refer to them as such even between classes, and the senpai in turn look out for the kohai and run the club, but the terms can be applied to any older student-younger student interaction.

I was lucky enough to attend a few clubs: karuta (a traditional Japanese card game, but it is to card games what go is to checkers), drama, English and guitar. Karuta went completely over my head, and ranks as one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen in my life. Let's put it this way: I thought one athlete (for it is in fact a sport) was having convulsions in the middle of the room, but this was standard procedure. I don't think I can describe it in words: I'll just say it was very cultural, utterly incomprehensible, and I knelt on the floor for so long I couldn't move my legs when I stood up and had to drag them across the floor.

Drama was GREAT craic: it was shocking to see the same first years that barely spoke two words during the day explode into fits of screaming and frantic shouting with absolutely no warning. The warm-up exercises were brilliant: Japanese tongue-twisters! Another day I could hear them echoing through the corridors after school, they were so loud. English club was brilliant too! The first session I went to the students had organised a welcome party for me, and everyone had brought something traditionally Japanese, and some food. For my birthday they got me some chocolates. :-) They were preparing for a debate - "Should Japan relax its immigration policies?" - and the Canadian teacher and I had a great chat about it while giving the students a few ideas, not that they needed our help! Their willingness to communicate with me, despite the limited range of their English, was fantastic! One or two of them (including one of my buddies from before) had done an exchange, and most of them planned to do one before they left school.

Though the club that left the greatest impact on my by far was the guitar club. It was a classical guitar club, as I later found out, and I only came because I happened to be talking to a girl from my class in the corridor after school on my last day when she mentioned it (long-winded sentence much?). They were so brilliant that I took a video of them, and will upload it when I figure out how this laptop reads SD cards (I have moved in with my second host family, you see - or rather, WILL move in next Monday - and haven't quite figured out their laptop yet). I think I'll just let you guys listen to them, rather than tell you about them.

So! One last thing to make you ponder. The Japanese school year (and the business year, I believe) begin in April, so the students' summer holiday lasts only a month (I always enjoyed seeing their reactions when I told them of our 3 month-long holidays, and that we get no homework; they get PILES and PILES of it). However, they only have 5 classes a day (though each individual class is longer than one of ours), a 5 to 10 minute break between each class, and minimal interaction during classes. Thing is, school starts around half eight, and all students do souji (cleaning) after school for about 15 minutes: caretakers don't exist in Japan. They are so efficient at souji that in the 15 minutes the whole place gets cleaned, though the middle school kids generally did it with more gusto than their more aged counterparts. But Japanese schools also have homeroom time (a period where the class teacher talks with them, gives them any news, information for the day, even occassionally free books) and after-school clubs - though in the case of sports clubs this becomes more of an obsession than anything else: my host sister, the baseball team's manager, was rarely home before 8 and stayed up several nights making good luck charms. In fact, she became so tired that she actually felt sad while we walked to school some mornings. Oh, and the pressure put on students for the college entrance examinations (no such thing as a Leaving Cert) is, well, perhaps a little WORSE (okay, I take it back, NOTHING is worse than the LC) than what we deal with in 6th year.

And they sometimes have school on Saturdays. My elder host sister, a 3rd year, even went in on Sundays to study.

So which system is better? Or is there such a thing?

PS: to everyone I know who is reading this, thanks for all the birthday wishes!