A gorgeous monday in Nagoya

Its so frickin' nice here right now. Its 53 degrees out but theres a predicted high today of 64. I'm walking around in a t-shirt.

I'm meeting Reina this Thursday for coffee and if this weather persists I'm gonna take a day trip to Gifu on Friday. This is the perfect time of the year to visit Japan if anyone is interested. The cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom and very soon the spring festivals will be starting. The sumo season just started and its not yet depressingly hot and humid. Just throwing it out there. I got the room if anyone can make the trip.

I had a lesson yesterday with three older guys and it was the biggest group I've ever had where we just threw the lesson away. Technically I think I can get into trouble for that since its forbidden unless the student booked a man-to-man lesson (the student has to pay for four lessons to buy out the other potential student's space). As long as no one complains to the Japanese staff you're ok, but you should really make sure everyone in the group wants to talk. Just one complaint could get you into a lot of trouble. Anyway, so these three guys were really smart and they were all research chemists and crap like that (I think they were level 4). We talked about Chinese history and karate and then I fielded some questions about why there are so many big cities in the northeast of the US. The answer I came up with had to do with colonization, manufacturing, and the hostility of the interior during settlement. I think it was pretty good but I had to think for a minute to answer it. It put me in such a good mood that I didn't mind having a functional illiterate in my next lesson.

So the students who come to Nova are given an assessment test on their first day and then placed in an appropriate learning tier. It starts at 7A which is for someone who can't do anything and the lessons consist of getting the students to say yes or no to questions like 'do you like pizza?' It was ok when I started because I liked the variety but it got old quickly. Now those lessons are the hardest because no one talks and you get bored with the material. The levels progress from there to 7B, 7C, 6, 5, and 4. There are higher levels but not at our branch. Any student we have that reaches a level 3 we send to the larger branches. So the typical level 4 has probably traveled a bit, can form a varity of sentence structures, and can answer why to a lot of your questions.

Asking a Japanese person 'why' however is something that a lot of them seem to hate. I find a lot of my students have very strong opinions but can't explain why the fuck they like/hate different things. A bullshit answer some will come up with is: 'I don't know how to explain in English.' For higher levels this is just a cop out. So when I ask people what books they read, what movies they like, or what kind of food they like, I can expect Japanese books, movies, or food as an answer.

Sensei Benn: 'Do you read?'
Loyal citizen: 'Oh yeah, I love to read books.'
Sensei Benn: 'What kind of books?'
Loyal citizen: 'Japanese books.'
Sensei Benn: 'Do you like western books?'
Loyal Citizen: 'No, not really.'
Sensei Benn: 'Why?'
Loyal citizen: '...'

I have this one guy named Keigo that thinks Japanese media dominates American and British media but has no idea why he thinks thats true. When I watch the news in Japan you almost never hear about world affairs and when you do its always some irrelevant shit that I would never care about. He acknowledged that the responsibility of the media is to provide us with unbiased information so that we can form our own opinions about the world, but couldn't back up why he thought Japan did a better job than the west in that respect. That might be a hard question to answer, but when Japan wins one measley gold medal at the Olympics for figure skating and I'm STILL watching clips of her performance someone is banging a drum.

Also, I can't catch the dialogue on TV, but I hear the word 'America' a LOT. I can't even imagine what they're talking about since it will come up in the most random situatios. I don't know if anyone back home is following the World Baseball Championship but Japan won this year. I was watching highlights of the game against Cuba and I heard 'America' more than I did 'Cuba.' What the hell are they talking about?

Lastly, a 24 hour grocery store just opened up in Kyowa. The old supermarket had hours of 10am to 8pm so this is significant for me. Its cheaper, about twice as big, but more than twice as far away from my apartment.

A new grocery store in my town is about all the excitement I can handle right now.