Kanji and Wish List

Claire and I have started to study the jyoyo kanji list. This is the nearly 2000 kanji that are can be used in printed material with out the need for a hiragana meaning being provided. Most Japanese people cant read and write all of them but the are the basis. We are splitting them up into grade levels and making a flash card for each one. Its time consuming but at the Board of Education all we have is time. Its really been kind of depressing to see how many kanji a high school graduate needs to get by. I have been trying to read some comics as practice and translate the towns brochures and things like that. In general though I feel like my Japanese is not getting better at a very fast rate. I guess its hard to push past good enough to get by to really good.

Claire, Stephanie, and I are also working on what I call out wish list. These are big events that we would like to do but want the Board of Education to help us with. So far we have things like, culture booth at town festival, variety show, play presenting a foreign story in Japanese, summer movie nights, and a Western sports day. Also, we are working on a simple English magazine to start handing out once a month to the kids. We will each do a page for each grade. My first I'm going to give an English expression and joke and explanations about them. Then since none of my kids know who Elvis is I'm doing a section of lets meet Elvis. I'm hoping that at my schools I can play Elvis music at lunch to really get the idea across. This school year I'm going to try and be a great ALT. Now, it being a lot easier to have ideas then do them we will see how much I get done. My main goal though will be to try and start getting the kids to think about and learn about things outside Iwate. The rural parts of Japan and just be so culturally isolated even from the rest of Japan. For example at church Sunday I mentioned a kind of coffee shop that is famous in Japan called Maid Cafes. They are themed coffee shops where the waitress dress as maids. They are pretty well known out side of Japan and in my experience very well known here. Yet, one of the church people I'm friends with had never heard of it. Now, I like Iwate and the people here are really great, but some times you just get amazed by what they don't know and what they do know. Like they don't know Elvis but know the Tennessee Waltz.