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/.

Graduation

I have now been to all my schools graduations, from kindergarten to middle school. Its been fun overall but very different from graduation at home. First, its very very somber much more like a funeral then a celebration. The kids having their names read is the smallest part of it. The rest of the hour or more is speeches. Even at the kindergarten there were at least 3 speeches. The kindergarten had their principle, the head of the school board, and the elementary school principle give speeches. The Middle Schools had the principle, PTA president, village government member, school board official, and some person whose roll I didn't catch at all speak. Let me tell you it was boring. After all the speeches there was singing of sad songs. The graduates would sing to the rest of the school. Then the rest of the school would sing to the graduates. Then the graduates and other students would sing together. Then we all sing the school song. Well, everyone else sings the school song and I mouth along with it.

After the Middles school graduations were the after parties. My schools had very different after parties. Chokai had a more casual thing with food and alcohol. The teachers all said something they remembered about the kids. I told them all how scared I was the first day, but how much fun I had with them. then we got pictures with the kids. One of the fathers got extremely drunk and so the closing was him telling embarrassing stories about the kids. People were fairly friendly to me, but they weren't really eager to talk to me. Kozuya's after party had no booze and was a lot more organized. The kids lead everyone in games. The big games were pretty fun. They did one were people blindfolded themselves and held their nooses and then ate something. They would then guess what they ate. Then we played a game where they had 4 rice balls 1 filled with wasabi and the other with pickles. The crowed watched the people and then voted on who ate the wasabi. The last was bingo for prizes, I won an umbrella. After Kozuya's after party there was what they call a nijikai which means second party. The second party was the drinking party. The teachers and parents got together for a kid free drinking party. It was a ton of fun. At the start of the party before the toast the fathers set on one side of the room and the mothers the other. None of the fathers wanted to sit next to me. So as soon as we toasted they all moved down the table away from me. Which kind of bummed me out. Then most of the mothers came and talked to me the rest of the night. It was great Japanese practice and nice to meet my students families. One of the mothers brought home made rice wine that was just delicious.

Oh one of my favorite teachers is being transferred this year. So when I start back in April I will be working with a new guy.