Earthquake 3

The town is still going about things as normally as they can. We are lucky that so much of our food comes from the farmers in the area. There is still plenty of vegetables and some home butchered meat coming in. Today the town ran out of one vital supply toilet paper. There is no more for sale in the town. Since there was only one role at my house I'm taking one home from work. This probably makes me the closest thing to a looter in the whole island. I know that this sound like a really trivial thing this close to a disaster and it is. There is strange feeling being this close to the tsunami zone and this far away. We are far enough away to be safe and to be unable to travel there on our own. Especially with the fuel shortage. However, we are close enough that we are running out of supplies so there is nothing to donate. To be honest I feel useless. There is so much that needs done and we cant do it.  Which makes me feel really guilty. I'm thankful to have come through safely and with only supply problems in my town. I just wish there was something I could really do for people. Because of how isolated my town has become we can't even give blood.

Earthquake 2

The Board of Education had the Internet so we should be in a bit more regular contact. Ichinohe is still doing pretty good in a lot of ways. People are calm and going about normal activities as best they can. My school at Kozuya even had its graduation ceremony today. You could almost forget what had happened. Till there was a small aftershock during the ceremony. After the ceremony it was annocunced that the town was out of gas. Rumor is that most of the prefecture may be out as well. The local trains and shikansen are still closed in the north part of Japan. This is mostly to conserve power. The toll roads and main highways are reserved for emergency vehicles only. They are warning people in Tohoku(the north) and Kanto(central Japan) to conserve power as much as they can. With the disasters at Fukushima Daiich and Daini and troubles at other plants the national power situation is a bit difficult. There are going to be rolling blackouts in Tokyo and most of Kanto. I don't think that this will effect our town though we might lose power completely. I want to encourage everyone to look into how they can donate to the relief effort. Many people in Japan have lost everything and need alot of help.

They Japan Meteorological Association has said that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7 earthquake in the 3 days following March, 13.

One site that has been recommended as a place to donate is http://www.amazon.com/.

First Days at Kozuya

I have just completed the first two full days of teaching. They have both been at Kozuya Junior High School. There are around 50 students in 3 grades here. This translates to there being three classes in the whole school. The first day I was here I only did one class of first year Junior High Students. I did my self introduction power point presentation. There were only a few students in the class who really seemed eager to participate. Don’t take this to mean that they were not interested. They were interested they just where to embarrassed to join in. I only have one story that I want to relate from the class. I went around the room and ask students their name, what sport they play, and what they liked. Every student in this school is part of a sports club which is why I asked what sport they played. I go around the room till I reach one of boys. He tells me his name. Then he says he plays baseball. So I ask the last question, “What do you like?” He looks at me like I’m a perfect idiot and says “I like baseball.” Even though his English was not the best in the class I felt that he reacted most like a native English speaker. After school all the students go to sports teams. My JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) is the couch of the boys and girls volleyball team. They have track and field, volleyball, baseball, and tennis. The school also has a pool but no swimming team. I tried volleyball a little, but quickly reviled myself to be terrible at volleyball. So, after that I helped out with baseball. It was a lot of fun I stayed about 40 minutes after school and played catch with the kids. Maybe when I have a bike I will stay longer. The next day I did my self introduction for the second and third year students. They seemed a lot more excited about it all. They asked a lot of questions in both English and Japanese. Being able to speak Japanese, even at the level I am, has helped a lot already. The other teachers don’t know English and so they feel more at ease because they can talk to me. Also, they have a really good impression of ALTs in general thanks to my predecessor Dan. (In a small aside when I ask something about how Dan did things or make a comment about how helpful Dan was they look at me like I’m crazy. Dan went by Daniel Sensei here and to call him anything else invites confusion.) The students seem to enjoy asking me questions in Japanese that are above their level of English, tough often the JTE has to translate. The second day I also helped to teach my first real lesson. We worked on teaching plural to the first years. Things like 1 pen vs. 2 pens or 1 CD vs. 2 CDs. We also did a dialog about ordering at a fast food restaurant. Samantha drew pictures of the food things like hamburger, cheese burger, and a truly hilarious picture of a chicken burger. The chicken burger had a whole live chicken between 2 buns the kids seemed to think it was funny. And you know what even if they didn’t I found it hilarious and will probably post a picture of it either with this post or latter and you all can tell me if it was funny or not. My vote is funny.
My name has been a big challenge here. Teachers students and well everyone has trouble with my name. They all make a very valiant attempt at it but its hard for them the L sound and the final B are very difficult. I hope that my other schools are this fun. Oh this weekend is the Ichinohe festival. It last for 3 days. I will miss the first day because I have to go to Morioka to get some immigration business taken care of but the second day Samantha, Stephanie, and I will dance in the festival. We will go to a class about the dance tonight or last night depending on when I manage to get this online. I hope that this will be a great time to meet some more people in Ichinohe. I also am going to say that I have heard the first round of post cards hit the US. We will be sending more and would love to get some post cards from home as well. If you want to send us one please email Samantha or I for our address and we will be happy to give it to you.
Part 2
Morioka was a lot of fun actually. I was nice to see the people I came to Iwate with. We also had some more training times. I did some shopping in Morioka. This weekend Samantha and I will get cell phones. We had to order them so that we could get English menus. We will be able to call each other for free which will be nice. I also found a bike. It’s a mountain bike that will be good for the snow. It’s a used bike but the frame is large enough for me and the bike shop is putting some work into it this week and I can get it Friday. I was in pretty good shape but they want to change the tires work a few places that were starting to rust and tune the brakes and gears. They were really helpful and the whole thing will be around 200 US dollars which is cheap for a real bike here. This weekend was the Ichinohe festival. Samantha, Stephanie, and I danced in it Saturday night. There were really cool floats that each area of town made. I have good pictures of all of them and will post those later. Sunday, Samantha and I helped our neighbors pull the float around town and through out area for 4 hours. We would stop and the kids would play flute and one of the older people would sing at different places in town. It was a lot of fun and we meet many people who lived around us. They were all very friendly. After, the festival we went with the adults from the area to a party above the local fire station. It was a lot of fun. We set with some of the town councilman until we reached the let your hair down part of the party. Then some more people came over and talked to us less formally. All in all it was a great day. People really made us feel a part of town. From our neighbor who saw us walking and invited us to help pull the float, to the old lady who gave us paper flowers to hang in front of the house like everyone else in town, to our local pharmacist who had us sit with her family at lunch, to the people who made it a point to talk to Samantha even if they had to wait for me to translate. It was just so nice to know that the people around us cared.

Today I taught my first Elementary School. Kozuya Elementary. It was fairly difficult actually. First, at Japanese Elementary schools they don’t have English teachers. This means that the level of English amongst the staff was pretty low. The fifth grade teacher had the best and I just had to do all communications in a horrible mix of English and Japanese, mostly Japanese. The students were friendly and really really high energy. The first thing they had me do was teach the fifth grade a game that I would later play with the whole school. That’s right I had to come up with a game for 87 kids who were in first to sixth grade to play. We did red light green light. The kinds loved it the teachers seemed to like it but it took them a whole to make the driving parallel. In the upper level classes I did an introduction in English and Japanese. Then the kids ask me prepared questions. The sixth grade teacher had a bit of trouble with the kids doing the questions. Some of the question were, “do you marry” and “what is your no thank you food.” Now the meaning of these questions is clear are you married and what food don’t you like so that’s a victory, but its still odd. At recess I played soccer with the kids. It was really more like mob with a ball. When it started there were two teams of five when it ended they were about 30 boys trying to steal the ball from each other. After that I did my introduction to 3rd and 4th grades and played some more games. Elementary is fun but exhausting.

Ichinohe/ waiting for the bride

I got to Ichinohe OK. I don't have the Internet at home yet and it may be a few weeks before I do. I can use it at work during the week and for an hour at a time on the weekends. I took pictures of the house but forgot them at home on Friday and so I can upload them till Monday at work. There is nothing for us to do at work till school starts. We have been using the Internet and studying mostly. I have started trying to translate a few things and read some Japanese comics.

I cant wait for Samantha to get here. It will be so nice to have her here. I know that it will be hard at times but I think it will be great for us.

The House/The Contract

Well we got a packet of information from Ichinohe. It was my contract, a brochure about the town (in Japanese), and some other information about the house. After a moment of reading, you know the other party was good at English, but they aren't a native speaker. In the part about the house it said, "Your place contains the following items:Everything (Furniture, Appliances, Cooking ware, etc)." Everything? Everything leaves a lot of room to interpenetrate. Does everything include heaters? Yes. Does everything include towels? Maybe.
What I am more worried about: does everything include piles of junk accumulated by former Teachers who lived there? Answer: probably things that were to big to take home and not big enough to sell. I'm told that between the three ALT houses there is a large collection of books. That is the kind of stuff that is good to know is there. The good thing about what Samantha and I are doing is that I'm going first so if there is anything I forget that we just have to have she can bring it.

The things I know I have to bring are gifts for 75 teachers that can be small. Prizes and teaching aides suitable for middle and elementary students. A nice gift for my boss. Professional/winter clothes for me and money. The many generous wedding gifts that we received will help with all that.
There are many other things to get done before we leave. I will need to make a power point about my life in America. We have to get our visas to enter Japan which we applied for.

There was a little hiccup with Samantha's ticket. We bought her ticket when we believed she would be changing her name. Now, for various passport-related reasons, she has to keep her maiden name for a while longer. 10 years ago, this might have been a simple fix. In a post 9-11 world though this name change is treated with all the severity of a TERRORIST THREAT. An hour and a half on the phone with Orbitz (somewhat) fixed the problem. Hopefully this whole escapade doesn't backfire somewhere in Chicago airport.

About Ichinohe

Ichinohe is a small town in Iwate Prefecture which is in the Northern part of the main island of Japan. The town has 15,000 people, 4 of them foreigners. Three of them are English teachers for the local school board and the other is Samantha. One of them has already been there for a year. For a little more background on the town: it's cold. There are several feet of snow a year and the only thing that anyone has told us there is to do in winter is ski/snowboard. I think that this means we will certainly learn to ski/snowboard. The guy I'm replacing says not to expect to see the ground from about December to April. To make the cold even more fun, houses in that part of Japan don't have insulation or central heating. That means that all of the heat we have in the winter will be from space heaters mostly kerosene which in turn means that for ever hour the heater is on we will have to have a window open for an hour. This will keep us from dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. Also, at night we will have to turn all the heating devices off to prevent fire. Which means that when we wake up the house will be as cold inside as out. However, we are both excited for the adventure of it all. It will be a new experience and we will learn a lot about each other and Japan.

About this blog. Samantha and I will both be posting here. That way you will get both our perspectives in one blog. We look forward to sharing our experiences with you and hearing your comments about them.