Going back to the USA after being in Japan for a year, was an adventure. I was really looking forward to it, since I had been really burnt out on Japan.

It was. . . interesting.

It was good to see my family and friends of course, but my situation (no actual room to stay in, I don’t drive, family drama) was not ideal. One month in America was too long; by the end I was more than ready to come back to Japan.

This was my sneaky plan to motivate myself for another year of JET and it worked.

For a while.

I was so excited to be back in Japan. To have my own apartment and be able to go wherever I wanted. We even took a trip to Osaka (one of my favorite places in Japan) to see Versailles and Phantasmagoria at Shockwave Osaka, and Cobra Starship, The Academy Is. . . and The Hush Sound at DecaydanceFest Osaka.

But now it’s only 4 weeks into the semester and I am already so, SO over teaching

Well, that’s a lie. Whenever I’m actually with my students I don’t feel that way. My students continue to be hilarious and amazing and the only thing keeping me at this job. I don’t think that will change.

But I’m not invested in the job, really.

Every Monday, I think about quitting. I mean, I won’t. I know it’s only because it’s Monday and everyone hates Mondays. But I think about doing this for 10 more months and I can’t imagine how I’ll ever make it.

Thing about living in Japan, is that I polarize Japan in the US with my emotions.  Previously this had been in the form of “Japan is the happiest place on earth!” while now it’s more “If I only I were in America, I wouldn’t feel this depressed.” Neither of these is true, and I know this, but it’s just really easy to blame Japan, and especially this job, when I’m having a bad time.

Today is the last day of classes for the semester, which means I’ve been teaching for an entire school year! In some ways it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, and in other ways it feels like an eternity.

Of course everyone is quite ready for the semester to be over, myself included. The past two weeks or so have been really really hot. Grades were also due about 2 weeks ago, so basically they have been pointless and miserable for everyone involved. The teacher’s room is cool, but the classrooms are swealtering; none of the kids can concentrate in this heat, and why should they since their grades were already due? Even the teachers are mostly over it. Today some of them were competing to see whose classroom was hotter.

I haven’t had many classes in a while, so I’ve been bored most of the time. Tomorrow I’m headed to America for a month long visit. I’m really excited, and could use the break; I need a chance to appreciate what it is I have here. I’m really going to miss my kids when I don’t see them for 4-6 weeks. They are really the only thing that makes this job worth doing.

The 3nensei continue to be hilarious for the most part. It’s becoming more and more evident how teenage-boy the boys are. One of them asked me “How many bust?” the other day. All of them have to quit club activities soon and start studying their lives away to prepare for the entrance exams they will take in the spring.

I’m becoming more and more fond of the 2nensei. One boy in particular is becoming one of my favorite students to talk to, even though he stubbornly refuses to talk in English. I don’t know what it is, maybe that he obviously really wants to talk to me all the time, but tries to pretend he’s really cool. The 2nensei girls are just really ridiculous, but they’re much more personable now that they are more comfortable with English. One of them kicked up my skirt today and then asked, in what I assume to be all seriousness, if foreigners menstrated. I don’t even know.

So, I will surely miss them. But absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that, right? I plan on getting a lot of prizes and taking a lot of pictures for them when I’m in America. I’m hoping that I’ll return from my vacation invigorated, ready to tackle another year here. Hopefully one that involves more travelling, more money saving, and more asserting myself at school now that I have a better idea as to what is going on.

Thanks, Japan. It’s been an interesting year. 来年もよろしく。

Yesterday was a pretty productive day at elementary school:

-I taught 6 classes, played animal pictionary 5 times, made three 4th graders cry, managed to not throw up while kids ate whole pregnant fish, and got chased by a 5th grader with a frog.

Elementary school, it’s insane.

Today is my 23rd birthday! I’m at jr. High today and wanted to enjoy it with my students, but as it turns out, I have NO classes ALL day because of testing. This is quite lame. However, I’m trying to make the most of it by planning an english bulletin board.

I also decided to ask one of my JTEs to eat with her class. It was a little awkward because I’ve never eaten with them before, and they are shy about talking. There was a second of panic over who I would sit with, but Belt!boy, who always asks for my belt but doesn’t really speak much english otherwise, freaked out and told me to sit with his group. We didn’t talk very much, but a few students tried to speak a little English. Afterwards my JTE said they had enjoyed it and asked me to come again, so that’s always nice.

One girl in that class had been asking me how to say “kintama” in English. I didn’t know what the word meant, so the best I could offer her was “gold ball” which is a literal translation. They always laughed at this so I finally looked it up. Unsurprisingly “kintama” means testicles, so I guess I wasn’t really that far off with the answer.

It’s June and apparently that means it’s the beginning of the rainy season here.

The kids can’t play outside when it’s raining, (well, sometimes the really hardcore ones still play soccer,) but basically this means one thing: SO. MUCH. TAG.

I guess it’s not weird to see the occasionally group of friends playing tag. The new 1nensei especially played it inside nearly every day when they first got to Jr. High. But today over half of the kids I saw, of all grades, were playing tag. In giant screaming packs. 15 year old boys being really into tag is hilarious.

I can only imagine what it will be like after weeks of rain.

Things have mostly been looking up since my last post.

Teaching at elementary school really is somehow the magical cure to an ailing spirit. Even if it is really tiring, it’s rewarding because it actually feels like I’m doing something. I’m usually in charge of the lesson contents, so even if my lessons suck (which they sometimes do) at least I’m accountable for it. (Unlike at my jr. high where I just sit and have nothing to do for most of the day.) Plus, with the except of some too-cool-for-school 5^th and 6^th grade classes, the kids are pretty great. Even on the worst day at elementary school, some kid is bound to say something funny. (Recently I’ve gotten a lot of “How did you get that big if you don’t drink milk?” Oh, the propaganda of the Dairy industry.)

Recess has been good lately too. Not that it’s ever really bad, but sometimes it’s just kind of boring. In the past few weeks thought I’ve played really good games of ball-tag, dodgeball and kickball.

Jr. High in contrast has been quite slow. This is largely because we had our sports festival this past weekend. We practiced for it for the past 2 months, which obviously cut into class time, which is why I haven’t had many classes lately.

The idea of Sports Day is quite fun, but I was quite tired of the whole thing by the time the actual day came around.

All of the students are divided into color blocks. In this case, red, white and blue. Blocks compete against each other in a number or various events. There are standard ones like relays, tug-o-war, and variations on 3 legged race, but there are also some crazy ones like a dry land version of chicken and boys being carried on poles like monkeys.

In actuality, by the time it’s time for the real event, half of the students are already injured in some way. The nurse definitely had some not-nice things to say about the chicken game.

I mean, it was all pretty entertaining (at least at first), but I’m rather glad it’s over now so I can hopefully have classes again, and at least pretend to be a functional teacher.

I’m still a little homesick, but I’m making my plans to go home in July. I’m really looking forward to it, and time usually passes fast here, so hopefully it’ll be that time before I notice.

Lately, I just have not been able to get excited about teaching. It’s not that I don’t love my kids, it’s just that it’s so easy to get by on this job without putting much into it. I hate that feeling that I’m just going along without being proactive about it.

This past weekend was GoldenWeek, a four day weekend. I mostly just hung out; nothing special except for one Kaya and Metronome live which was fun.

But today is the first day of a 3 day work week, it’s 9am, and I already don’t really care. Probably this isn’t helped by the fact that my schedule is never finished when I show up to school, so I can never get excitied or plan anything because, as of yet, I don’t have any classes scheduled.

I really hope I get out of this funk because I hate the feeling that I’m wasting precious time here.

11 weeks till school is out for summer.

Hopefully not too much longer than that before I go home for a visit.  I’m really hoping that being in America will help me appreciate what I have here in Japan.

End whining.

What just happened?

After lunch, I walked around school a bit and ended up heading outside to watch kids play soccer. I ended up running into my favorite girl and her friends who were starting a dodgeball game. I joined in but my team lost pretty horribly.

We parted ways and I headed back to the teacher’s room. We started hearing some stomping and wondered what it was so one of the gym teachers apologized, saying it was probably students practicing this traditional japanese dance for the sports festival next month. I had kind of been considering trying to learn the dance at some point, but it’s really strenuous so I just wanted to watch it again first.

When I reach the classroom they students dancing are all in a big circle and a bunch of other kids are watching from the hallway. The gym teacher notices me and is like “Look guys! Alexis came to watch you! Do it!” and they start dancing.

 But no more than a few moments into the song she pushes me into the middle of the circle and makes me do it with them. (Which is really hard to learn from the middle of the circle. Also, how is that all gym teachers can bend people to their will?) I mean, it was fun, despite my inability to actually do the dance. I was just kinda flailing comically. But the kids thought it was hilarious, so that’s what’s important. But at the end some kids call out something about me and they all gather around me and the gym teacher yells for me to strike a pose, so I do some ridiculous belly dancing pose. She’s been wielding a camera the whole time.

Did we seriously just have an emergency assembly because someone found some GUM WRAPPERS?

Why, yes. Yes we did.

I honestly do not understand the discipline system here. Maybe it makes more sense if you know what the hell is going on, but I doubt it.

Once upon a time (okay, so it was like 2 weeks ago,) I went to see Kaya who was playing with Sugar/Insanity frontier/S’elm/R指定.

Turns out this was to be Kaya’s last indies live!

I usually don’t like events, but this one was pretty fun.

Usually I feel really out of place, but people were being really nice. One girl who came to see Sugar just sat down and started talking to me which NEVER happens to me so I was happy. And later some girl stopped me to ask if she had seen me at D’s oneman.

Once Kaya started I met 3 other gaijin who were there. They were all really nice so we hung out the rest of the night.

The other bands weren’t bad and Kaya was wonderful as usually. Kaya played the upcoming major debut single, which is really genki. Kaya talked a lot as usual, but as it was 2 weeks ago I don’t remember most of. See kids, this is why you need to write live reports immediately.

I was disappointed by Sugar. There is just like no energy in the room when they play. I don’t know if it’s them, or the fans, or what. This is Dispite Loki being ridiculous and the guitarist being insane. But it was worht staying becaue Kaya came out to play with them for the encore. I think Kaya and Loki are either siblings, or fucking, or both.

Kaya’s debut is soon so we’ll see what happens when I go to the next live in May.

Sometimes I find myself baffled by the Japanese school system. They often do things quite differenly from America, and no one really explains it to me, so I just wonder around confused. The beginning of the new school year is apprently one of these times.

First of all, Japanese teachers get transferred between school fairly frequently. I hear the average is something like 6 years at one school before a transfer, but it varies. Teachers however, don’t know they are getting transferred until roughly 2 weeks beforehand. Thus, 2 weeks ago I was in the Board of Education the day all the tranfers were passed out. Principals from all the schools come and get an envelope with all the transfers for their schools. They then go back and tell the concerned teachers.

I hadn’t been back to my Jr. High since then, so Today (the first day of the new school year) I was in for all sorts of surprises.

1. My desk has moved from the front with the 3nensei teachers, to the back with the 1nensei teachers.

2. I only see 2 of my 6 JTEs. This is because

3. 17 teachers are getting transferred. In the morning, we have a small ceremony to say goodbye.  Of course, this means

4. 21 new teachers. 4 new JTEs who have all introduced themselves and seem nice. We have a ceremony for them too.

5. Opening cermony I have done before, so it was nothing new. Except at one point a line of teachers went up to be introduced. The VP gestured that I should go to, which surprised me. Basically I just didn’t know what the hell is going on and it was apparently funny cuz a bunch of kids laughed. It would have been really embarrassing if I didn’t know the kids already.

The new 1nensei don’t come for a few more days. Today the new 2 and 3nensei got their new class assignments. It will be strange to teach whole new class dynamics, but I’m excited.

We also got a new supervisor last week so who knows how that will go.

It seems like the next few days will be filled with confusing ceremonies, but we’ll see what happens.