The Eye of Patrick

The day of the speech contest arrived last week. This was going to be my first time being involved in a speech contest as a teacher and not as a student. So as a result I was a little nervous about whether I would able to teach the students enough to do well in the competition. This was also the Japanese teacher of English (JTE) first time too so I was not alone in not knowing what to expect.

The car ride to Fukagawa was a fairly fun trip as we decided to take my JTE’s car instead of taking the train. The reason was that the train to Fukagawa has a very irregular schedule and so the return trip to Shimokawa would involved a two hour wait after the competition at the train station. Also by driving we were able to save some money. The reason is that in Japan that trains are fairly expensive and so are the highways. But if more then one person is going in the car (in our case 4 people) then it can be cheaper, as the toll fee is paid for the car only and not in relation to the number of people in the car. The train is usually cheaper only in situations were you are going alone.

The route that we took to get to the speech contest was through the country roads. This meant that we were able to avoid the heavy traffic that sometimes occupies the main road and give us more time to talk. This is a wonderful thing as my high school JTE is one of the best people I have met in my town. She speaks English really well and has a cool personality. (By cool I mean that she is a unique person and has her own opinion. This is sometimes hard to find in a country where many people will not share their opinion if it goes against the beliefs of the group) so the drive there passed quicker then I thought it would.

In preparing the night before, I had charged my ipod and brought the fm turner to let it use the car audio to play music. When I brought out my ipod and fm turner both my JTE and the students were amazed at the device. They could not believe that you could listen to music from your ipod through the car radio. (The ipod has taken longer to get popular in Japan compared to Canada or USA as a result there is a larger selection of mp3 players at the electronic story then back home) I played music that ranged from stuff she knows from the 80s to Japanese music that my students knew. It was like our own private karaoke room in the car.

We got to Fukagawa and started to register for the contest, we had to go to a pre-meeting to understand the rules for the contest. It was all in Japanese and I could not understand a word of it, but I was happy that my JTE invited me to go to the meeting. It felt like she was treating me as an equal partner in teaching. This is a feeling that I don’t always get with the other teachers. A lot of time at my other schools they are so used to operating without me there, that when I am there they fail to help me get involved. But not my JTE at the high school, she helps to make sure I am involved in school life.

After the meeting the contest started. The contest opened like they always do in Japan and that is with an open ceremony filled with very uninteresting and monotone driven speeches by the contest organizers. This did not help to raise my excitement for the speeches to follow. After we got through that, the contest started. There was a small selection of speeches that the students could select from. At first it was interesting to hear all the speeches. But as time progressed and I heard the same group of speeches over and over, I started to be able to repeat them in my head. But I don’t blame the students for that.

Some of the speeches were amazing and I could not tell they were non native speakers. Usually those people were the students who went to the international high schools and probably got more opportunity to interact in an English environment. It was amazing to watch them attempt to give a speech in their non-native tongue. I watched and thought to myself about when I was a student and how nervous I was at giving speeches in my own language. I couldn’t imagine the pressure of given one in another language. Some of the people added emotion to their speeches, in one about the bombing of Hiroshima; the girl grew louder to describe the dropping of the bomb. This really helped to bring life to the speech. While another girl forgot her speech on stage and took out the paper with the speech on it and read. I feel very proud of her for not giving up and staying on the stage. She could have cut and run, but she fought through her nerves and finished. I hope I have that kind of courage when I face awkward situations.

When my students came up and did their speech I felt so proud of them. They stumbled and where not perfect. But they got through and finished the speech and for that I respect them so much. I wanted to hug them and give them all high fives after it.

I think afterwards I felt really positive about the experience. This was a first experience for both my JTE and me in participating in a speech contest. But I think it was a good learning experience and that we can be much more prepared next year. Plus I had the opportunity to get to know some of my students for who they were and about their lives in a more personal setting. Which is a break from the typical days were I am in a class of 20 students and maybe can engage in a small conversation. I really look forward to working with my students and preparing them for the next year contest.

So I mentioned in my previous post that I would talk about why I went to Fukagawa, Hokkaido on Thursday and I will also talk about my adult English class welcome party.

Let’s go back to Wednesday where I was at my job for the whole day (8:30-4:15.) But after work I had to go to the high school and help some of my students train for the speech contest the next day in Fukagawa. I had a 1^st year and a 2^nd year going to participate in the speech contest.

One of the ways that we made the review easier was for me to record the speech on tape and then they could listen to it again and again. When I recorded it, I did it 3 times; 1 word by word, 2 sentence by sentence and repeating each sentence twice and finally the whole speech. This was a great idea as it gives them the ability to hear native level speech without having to be with the native speaker.

The speech contest would be the reciting an already written speech. This made helping them in some ways easier as we didn’t have to spend time on writing the speech and could work more on the memorization and delivery of the speech. But it was also still a challenge as for the most part they did not fully understand the speech they were required to speak and so did not know where to stress and where to rest.

So we spent Wednesday going over the speech and seeing if they could remember it. This was exciting because we had been practicing for so long so to finally be able to see the results of our work was great. They were able to remember the majority of the speech and only had a few problems. With each time they did it the quality improved and improved. I think we worked on it for 2 hours before we had to call it quits as they were getting tired and no more practice would make it much better. Plus they needed their sleep. So I said good bye to them and left work to my next activity.

After the school I met up with my Eikaiwa class (English conversation class) and we had decided to go to an okonomiyaki restaurant and have some drinks and food for the evening. This would also be my enkai welcome party, as it is the custom to usually have a welcome party for the new member of the group (that being me). They knew I had lived in Osaka for a year and thought it would be nice to have some okonomiyaki.

So we met up at the board of education, which is the place I go every day for my work. The reason was that even though my town is small, 4000 people and I had been here for 2 months I still did not really know where all the restaurants where and I didn’t want to get lost.

Plus the fact was that we were going to drink beer and in Japan you can’t drink and drive (0.0 blood alcohol limit) and so usually everyone goes in one car and they drop everyone off at the restaurant and goes back to their home and walks back, so that everyone can enjoy the drinking. This is one thing I like about Japan, because in Canada you can have a blood alcohol level of 0.08 and this raises a lot of questions of known when you have reached the level.

My Eikaiwa group is made up of 4 regular members and then has a few that float in and out of the classes. So on the day of my enkai there were 6 people including me and one of the local town’s people decided to join. He was a funny guy who was I think late in his 20s or early 30s and had been to my home province of Alberta.

The rest of the evening was the eating and cooking of okonomiyaki and monjayaki. We talked and laughed and told stories. I told them that Hokkaido is very like Canada, except that there are more Japanese people. They laughed at that.

As the evening progressed further and it seemed like we were running out of things to say I felt blue because I thought we had only been there a short time and we had already ran out of things to say. But then it turns out we had been there for 2 hours and it was the end of my allocated Eikaiwa class. So I felt happy to meet these people that were so interested in learning English, as usually my students do not have a keen interest in learning English. But these students have a genuine interesting in talking English and explaining Japanese culture to me. When I am with them I feel that I am truly experiencing internationalization.

One of the members ordered a taxi and we drove home and I went to bed as my next day was going to be busy.

My next post will be about my experience at my first speech contest. I will have some photos to share also from it.

With regards to my blog I will try to keep my posts to a limit of 1000 words and try to post every day to 2^nd day.

Please give me your suggestions for improving my blog and how I can improve my writing style.

Patrick

Yesterday I was busy in Fukagawa (A post for another day) and so I missed the Nippon Ham Fighters vs. Fukuoka Softbank Hawks in the Pacific League Pennant Series. This was disappointing as I have started to take a keen interest in the Ham Fighters since coming to Hokkaido. But luckily I was able to read about it in the papers and the news as good.

Nippon Ham Fighters won 1-0 in the 2nd game of a 3 game series. They came into the series with already ahead in the series 1-0 thanks to finishing first in the Pacific League regular season. Even with that lead the game was a nail biter due to the low scoring and the lack of runners in scoring position for the ham fighters.

But like the game I saw a few weeks back, when they won in the 11th inning against the Chiba mariners, I knew they could come back. This might simply be my luck to have blinding faith in a team that was able to win. But either way I was happy with the result.

The scoring run came off a hit by Atsunori Inaba, who was able to hit the ball far enough in the 9th inning to force a fielders choice and let Hichori Morimoto run all the way from 2nd inning to home plate, which granted the Nippon Ham there first pennant league series win in 23 years and the first one since moving to Hokkaido in 2004 from Tokyo.

The Japan Series will start October 21^st in Nagoya, Japan against the Chunichi Dragons. I will be in Sapporo at the time buying my new DSLR camera so I will see if I can get tickets to the game and if I can’t you will probably find me standing in front of a TV in some random shop, bar or hotel watching and hoping to see the Ham bring the championship to Hokkaido.

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In a Cnn article I just read and would like to share with you guys. It goes to show you the state of the world we live in; when an earthquake is just an earthquake is a good thing. As many of you know North Korea is currently testing a nuclear bomb. I think it is underground so there is possible earthquake like vibrations that could be felt in Japan; Japan is very antsy about North Korea testing the bomb.

So when an earthquake was felt Wednesday (today) some were worried it was a nuclear bomb testing, and for a bit of time it was reported as a possible test. But it has gone on to be confirmed as simply an earthquake.

So I just had a laugh thinking how it was good to find out the earthquake was not the result of North Korea. Hopefully we can resolve the North Korea Nuclear problem without resorting to something drastic as I would like to continue to live in Japan for the near future.

Take care,

Patrick

 Article Source

Before I start my story today, I should give some background info. My town, Shimokawa is famous for producing a high number of Olympic caliber ski jumpers. As a result my town gets extra funding to have a fairly sophisticated program with very talented coaches. This also means that they are always training, come winter or summer.

During my short stay in Shimokawa I have become fairly good friends with a number of the teachers and coaches that run the ski jumping program.

While at a yakiniku party with some of the ski jumping coaches, one of the coaches mentioned that he was going to Sapporo for a ski jumping competition and that if I liked I could join him and watch my students compete.  I said yes, but thought in my head that it was just another hallow invitation. The reason I thought this was because in some of my past dealings with Japanese people, I learnt the fact that you are invited to something is not an actual invitation to do something, but a sign that they hold you in positive regard and maybe down the road you will do something together. So when I was invited to attend the ski jump competition I did not put too much creditable in it for this reason and also the fact that numerous beers had be consumed by all.

So it was to my surprise that during the following week that the coach approached me and asked me if I was still interested in going. Normally I would say no because I am fairly shy person and don’t like going out of my comfort zone. But I thought to myself, that I should try and experience new things. So I said yes and then he informed me that we would be living at 5 am that Sunday and that if I was still interested in going. I thought to myself that I would probably not get an opportunity to do this again and that I would probably have a boring Sunday if I didn’t go. So I said yes with a smirk on my face.

The week leading up to the ski jumping competition in Sapporo would pass fairly uneventfully. So that by Sunday I was very excited to being heading to Sapporo. The lucky or unlucky thing about me is that when I am forced to wake up for something that is not part of my daily schedule,  I worry too much about waking up on time and end up not sleeping well and also waking up 30 minutes to an hour before my alarm will go off. This has been good to me, in the sense that I am normally never late for something, but sometimes results in me being fairly tired.

The bus ride to Sapporo was pretty uneventful, as it was a 2 hour bus ride in the early morning. At first I and the students had an uneasy relationship as we both knew we could not communicate with each other and we were both tired. So the trip there was filled with me listening to my ipod and sleeping.

But then at 8 am or so we arrived in Sapporo and headed towards the ski jump place. For many of you this may seem like an impossible concept; jumping in the summer, I for one thought that the whole bus ride there. But when we got there I had learnt that they just use artificial grass and that because the jumpers wear so much protection it is not a problem to jump in the summer.

I learnt an interesting tidbit about ski jumping. That there is a white line near the end and if the jumper is able to make it pass that line and then crashes it is ok and they will get full points. But if they crash before that point they lose 10 meters or so. I thought that was interesting and that kind of explains why when I have watched it on TV that there was so much importance places on getting past that line and why what look like great jumps end up not scoring that well.

At first we unloaded the bus and took all their gear to the top of the hill and then they did some warming up and stretching. This is important as to jump is a fairly physically exhausting experience. The pictures to the right show some of the training that was going on; most of the warm up was simulating an actual ski jump experience. It may look easy in the pictures or on TV. But the truth is that it is fairly challenging to hold the same pose for the whole duration of the jump. The take off and landing is especially difficult as it requires precise attention to detail as jumping to early or to late will result in a lower distance jump, while landing too late will result in a crash.

The group that I went with was made up of kids from my elementary school and their grades ranged from 2 to 6. Their young age meant that many of them had never jumped before and as a result there were a lot crashes as they learnt to jump properly. This is why they start off at the smaller jump hill and work there way up to the Olympic level hills by high school or university. One of the coaches’ kids from my town was jumping for only his second week only. In his previous jumps he had always fallen. So it was a real joy for our team that this time on his final jump he was able to land. I think that will help to build confidence in him and let him do more difficult jumpers later on. I hope he turns out to be a great jumper.

The other coach from my town was once ranked 5^th in Japan in the 70s for Nordic combined. His wife was also a fairly high level sports competitor and together they had two kids that were jumping in this competition. So it was not a surprise then later when the results were released that both of his children finished 1^st in the age category that they participated in. (I should take a photo of their trophy case at home, it would put any one I know back home to shame, his whole family is amazing jumpers,, grandfather, father, coach and children)

After seeing them jump, I thought it was funny to see my students jump fearless from the edge of a cliff and not worry about falling and hurting themselves. But when they are faced the question “how are you” they will freeze up and not be able to talk.

After the results were announced we headed back to our bus and returned home for some yakniku and good conversation. I am really started to love my town and all the wonderful people that go into making it the best little town in Japan.

Maybe next post will be about the wonderful restaurant in my town and why they are the kindest people I know.

If you have any interesting stories or comments to share, please leave and I will reply.

Thank you,

Patrick