What's in a Name?

So, the last post was kind of a non-post and I feel like I should make up for it. So here you go, have a Japan story.

One of the by-products of teaching English in a small community in Japan is that you tend to be around kids a lot. And when you're around kids a lot, it is inevitable that you are also going to be around their parents at some point. Because kids and parents go together like... like two things that go really well together.

Yesterday, one of my elementary schools held an open house day. What this amounted to was a horde of parents descending upon the school to watch their children in class. I'm unsure if they were there to support their kids or if they were there to see what kind of teachers their kids have. Possibly both reasons.

At any rate, I was not given any classes to demonstrate. Fine by me. The less responsibility foisted upon my shoulders, the better. Instead, I wandered about from class to class, showing my smiley face to all the little kidlets and saying hello to the parents.

At one classroom, I was approached by a particularly happy looking woman.

"Are you the English teacher?" she asked.

I replied in the affirmative.

"Oh great!" Her smile opened up wide enough to show her pearly whites. "You see my son over there? He has a younger brother now! Well, he already is the younger brother - he has an older sister, you know - but now there's another younger brother in the family."

Thinking she was just excited to talk to a foreigner who knew her son, I congratulated her. Given how fit she looked, I guessed the birth was not an immediately recent event. Still, it must be recent enough that it was noteworthy. I decided it has happened in the last few months.

"Well," she continued, "I told my son that he could name the new baby. He thought about it for a little bit, then said 'Canada'."

She laughed.

"Canada?" I replied, dumbfounded. Would a Japanese person actually use a name like that?

"That name is a little strange, of course," she said, "so we went with Kanata."

I told her I thought that was an excellent choice for a name. At that point her son barreled out of the classroom and into his mother. I grinned while she explained to the boy what she had just told me. He glanced at me shyly, then ran back into the classroom, presumably to escape my piercing gaijin eyes.

And there you have it. Your Jeffles has inspired the names of children in Japan. If that isn't internationalization, nothing is.

~Jeffles

Definitely the Electric Toilet

Hi again everyone. I'm a bit late this week, my apologies. But better late than never, right?

In fact, if you've been following my youtube channel, you may have noticed that I have a new video up! This one has seriously been a long time coming and for that I really am sorry. If you want to know what has really held me up, it's the video editing.

First, there's the fact that the video editing software seriously eats up my system resources, thus meaning that using the program to do finnicky things (like editing video) is really difficult. Fine control is virtually impossible. Second there's the fact that it simply takes a lot of time to edit video. You have to keep going over and over the same bit again to find the exact spot you want to cut/add in/fade/whatever and the time adds up. These reasons plus the fact that I'm usually already quite tired by the time I get home means that video editing often gets put on the back burner.

So yeah, video editing is really quite tiresome in many ways. It's rather rewarding in the sense that you could end up creating something really cool, but it kind of takes some work. This is, I strongly suspect, why so many people just upload their videos without any editing. I can't do that. My videos would look like complete and utter crap and no one would want to watch them. Hell, the editing I do isn't even that complicated. It's basically just cutting and trimming here and there.

Anyway, that's the reason why I've been slow at putting up videos. And with NaNoWriMo coming up, I'm probably going to continue to be slow at videos. Most of my energy is going to be going into my novel and I make no apologies for that. Blog entries will also probably get shorter. Alas, that's just the way it is.

Speaking of NaNo, I've been diving headfirst into that. Haven't started writing yet, of course (it's not yet November), but I've been doing lots of planning and practice. Need a lot more of both than I'm managing to do, but I'm doing my best. Almost done with some characterization questionaires for my two main characters and I've gotten a lot of ideas from that. Also, I have a much better grasp on my characters, which makes me happy. Yay.

It's interesting how much I've dived into this. At work, between classes, eating lunch, I'm always thinking about it or trying to get some planning and/or practice done. Even standing around in class sometimes, if I've been relegated to being a tape recorder, I often find my thoughts wandering off. What would Enos order for his last meal? Is Rachel one-dimensional? Where exactly should the novel start off?

Then I hear a "...Jeffu-sensei..." and suddenly it's back to reality and work. But strangely, it feels almost as if I've been ripped out of reality and into some strange place that I don't understand. Well, to be fair, this is Japan. It is a strange place that I don't completely understand. But that's beside the point. I'd have the same feeling if I were in the US or Canada.

Anyway, I expect things are only going to get worse over the next month and a half. Once I start actually writing the novel... well, it'll be interesting to see what happens, anyway.

*coughjoinmeinmynanocrazinesscough*

This weekend I'm heading back to Osaka for a couple days. I've been invited into a Japanese family's home for dinner and such and there's no way in hell I can decline an invitation like that. Really, it's not that common of a thing to happen. Hell, my host took a day off work to spend the day cooking dinner for when I arrive tonight. So we'll see how that goes. We were supposed to go to Kyoto for the Jidai Matsuri this weekend, but it's going to rain. My host said that, as a result, we probably won't go. Sad times.

Anyway, that's all I got for now. Talk to you next week.

~Jeffles

P.S. I feel like passing along a question asked by one of my younger students. Mostly because it's too strange not to. What's your favorite electric appliance in Japan?

A Glimpse Into the Future?

Konnichiwa! Hisashiburi da ne?

(Google it if you don't understand.)

I would apologize for not having been around, but I have been around. Just, I've been on youtube. That's right, I have two new videos up! Watch 'em, love 'em, spread 'em around like hot butter on a slab of toast.

You can find them here and here respectively. The intro is new. Is it too long? Not enough sparkly transitions? Need more nearly-naked cat-girls? Let me know what you think.

So, I've covered a lot in the videos, but there's just no way to cover it all. That's what this here blog is for.

As I mentioned in the previous blog post, my days have been so completely filled up that I honestly have no free time. That hasn't changed much. I think it will start to calm down a bit starting tomorrow, but only be for a short while. Once school starts up in September, I'm going to be crazy busy. I have eight different schools to go to, the majority of which require at least a half-hour bike ride...

Anyway, last weekend was yet another festival. It was really quite cool. I did take video of it and will be uploading another youtube jvlog soon, but there are some things that weren't captured on camera.

One of the previous ALTs, a successor of ours, came back to town for the evening. You see, he still had some things left here and needed to pick them up. He also was going to go to the Milky Way festival with us. So as a result, we all got to meet him.

I mention this because it is interesting to me. The majority of foreigners that I have met here in Japan have been people who are themselves new to Japan. We commiserate over our lack of Japanese language ability. We try to muddle through designing our first lesson. We come face-to-face, time and time again, with strange and weird Japanese customs. I won't even go into trying to navigate the train system. Then here comes this guy.

It's hard to explain what it was like to meet him for the first time. His hair, the color of granite, had been buzzed close to his head. Half his fingers were adorned with huge, intricate rings. Each one was different from the next, yet all were the size of small boulders. Around his neck hung a steampunk stopwatch that he said he picked up in Tokyo (or was it Osaka?) for about ￥2500. That it didn't work hardly seemed to matter.

Yet that doesn't really describe him either. He was a bundle of energy, but carried himself as if consciously subduing an inner beast that really, at the end of the day, just wanted to play. The first time I heard him speak, there were three young kids literally hanging off him to try and get the basketball in his hands. Without skipping a beat, he introduced himself to us, dislodged the children, and swished the ball.

As night fell and a dinner of somen noodles and incredible local fruit ended, we arrived at the festival. It was a bit of a drive as it was taking place up in the hills and we all lived in the town, but none of us really minded. It was something different, after all. Who doesn't like a little change of pace?

The minute we stepped onto the festival grounds, the scene transformed from one where we were simply strangers to one where gaggles of school children were swarming on our ring-clad sempai. What did he do? He reveled. Group after group after group came clambering over to him. He, cool as a a breeze on a hot summer day, dealt with them one by one, the smile never leaving his face. He took their energy and threw it right back at them. He challenged them to speak to us and they accepted the challenge, because it was he that posed it to them. They asked for pictures. They talked about their summers. They couldn't get enough.

And then he stepped away and left us. There were photos to take and he had to take them. Alone, we explored the festival grounds.

No one approached us. No one ran at us, shouting our names with glee. I bought some fried pork on a stick and chewed it thoughtfully, getting little more than a curious glance as the seller realized I was a gaijin. This man, our sempai, had only been here a year and had already garnered such a following. I supposed it was only natural. Kids are kids and they love strange things. He certainly was strange. And now he had moved on to bigger and better things. There was some sort of quasi-Christian, Buddhist sect in Kyoto that he said he was staying with. Soon they'd be sending him to Korea to further their mission of world peace. It sounded almost fictional.

Fireworks and a bonfire of paper lanterns plus tree brought the festival to an end. We returned to town. Our sempai took two of us out for drinks where, in spite of running on three hours of sleep, he displayed yet more of his genki self. At one point, he was so caught up in the story he was telling that he found it necessary to stand on his chair while he waved his hands and filled the one-room bar with his voice. No doubt drawn in by his energy, some guys at the bar top treated us to okonomiyaki and some dried squid thing (it was actually quite delicious). Finally, fatigue overtook us and we went our separate ways. He displayed one last act of generosity and paid for the entire night.

As I biked home down my narrow little street, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of man I would become in a year.

~Jeffles