Month: November 2002

I saw this printed on an ashtray:

Ashtraies are coming up in a more fashionable and characteristic style now many different shapes—full of ideas it’s a spice to make your life more fashionable with good sense of living.

I spent last weekend in Tokyo, with a side-trip down to Yokohama on Sunday to inspect and photograph a sailboat as a favor for a friend. I left Nagano Saturday mid-day as it was starting to snow. The weather in Tokyo, on the other hand, was excellent.
Saturday afternoon I wandered around Aoyama, where my grandparents lived in the 1930s. I found the neighborhood where they lived and tried to find their address (the house would have been long gone by now), but their actual address no longer exists.
Japanese addresses are notoriously hard to find. Cities are sub-divided into wards, then districts, then neighborhoods, then blocks, then non-sequential houses. There are no street addresses. Finding a specific place usually takes some wandering.

It’s early November, and Japan is already gearing up to celebrate the birth of Christ.
No, wait—that’s not right.
Try again.
It’s early November, and Japan is already gearing up to pray at the church of rampant consumerism.
Christian missionaries—my great-grandparents included—failed to sell Christ here (Japan’s Christians make up only one percent of the total population—good for them, I say), but the Japanese sure converted to capitalism with mind-boggling zeal. Even in the midst of a decade-long recession, shopping remains a favorite pastime, almost a religion unto itself. And modern-day Christmas fits right into the shop-till-you-drop ethos found here.
In Tokyo this past weekend, I saw a tree-lighting ceremony in Ginza. It was November 9! This is insane. Something needs to be done to stop the shopping juggernaut that is Christmas. At this rate, it’ll only be a decade or so before this increasingly inane holiday gobbles up the whole year.

I really wanted to take a picture of the old woman who came to the gym today wearing a maroon velour shirt and tastefully matched maroon leather pants.

This week at my school there are no regular classes. Instead, we’re teaching a combination of demonstration classes and special interest classes.

The demonstration classes are part of our fall “Self-Study Campaign,” which encourages students to purchase additional materials to study at home. This helps make money for the company and assists students in their studies. It’s not such a bad thing; I’m lucky to work at a school that doesn’t really push a lot of the business and hard-sell responsibility on teachers. The self-study materials end up selling themselves to those students who are interested in doing more studying outside of class, which is always important.

We’re also teaching special interest classes this week, which is really just a way of saying we can teach whatever the hell we want. “Come up with something interesting,” they told us. I must not have heard the “interesting” part, because I decided to teach HTML. “Building a Web Page,” I called it. “HTML is a language like English or Japanese, but it communicates with web browsers.”

Surprisingly, people signed up.

My first class—yesterday—was not so successful. I learned that it’s very difficult to fill 50 minutes with talk of HTML in a class of low-level (we’re talking LOW-level) English speakers. My two classes today were much better better, mostly because they were with intermediate students who could understand a few of the things I said. But still, it was a lot of time lecturing to students with blank looks on their faces.

For each class, I did some basic web vocabulary, a very basic review of HTML language, and then asked the students to write a profile of themselves. We took pictures, entered the photos and information into some HTML templates I’d created in advance… and then previewed the finished product (until the last part of class, we only saw the web page in HTML/text format).

For a look at some students who didn’t realize they were going to have their pictures taken, go here, here and here.

One woman (the one who wants to be bilingual and trilingual), came up to me after class and said for security she didn’t want to have her name and photo up on the internet. If she’s in the witness protection program, she’s got a great disguise. She was content with me removing her name from the profile.

Another woman made me shrink her head in her photo (“Is this enough?” “No. More.” “Is this enough?” “No. More.” “Is this enough?” — A small head is considered attractive in Japan, and I must say that I’ve had more than one compliment on my petite pate.)

I have two more beginner classes this week (groan…) and one more intermediate class. That’ll teach me.