Kelly's Heroes-shima

Don't worry, I haven't been attacked by a bear.

It's silver week! I have a five day weekend thanks to a very fortunate arrangement of Respect for the Aged Day, Autumnal Equinox day, and the rule that a single day falling between two public holidays becomes a holiday too. This in turn was made possible by the introduction in the last decade of the Happy Monday System, a holiday during which the Japanese traditionally take lots of drugs and dance with maracas.

Yesterday I went to Yamagata City, the capital of my prefecture. I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't a particularly successful day of sightseeing. I went with the vague plan of finding a big games shop that might sell imports, and buying a PS3 and Rock Band 2. Yes, having disposable income after a year of careful saving has gone to my head a little. Not only did I fail to find Rock Band, I failed to find a video game store. I'm not really sure how this happened - I wandered the streets for hours in a city of 280,000 in the homeland of Sony and Nintendo. I can only assume the games shops are tucked away in retail parks far outside the city centre.

Maybe I didn't give it a proper chance, but I'd have to say Yamagata didn't have a great deal to recommend it. According to my guidebook its number one attraction is Yamadera temple, but that's a 15min train ride away from the town, so I didn't see it. I found a reasonably nice park where there used to be a castle, but unfortunately it was destroyed 130 years ago, leaving only a series of small walls. Exhausted from the heat and the walking, I shamefully went into McDonalds for a daburu kwoutaapaundaa chiizu. When I came to Japan with Danny we must have averaged about 0.7 McDonalds trips per day, but I'm pleased to say this was my first time in any Western fast food joint in the 7+ weeks I've been here. Maybe I've been eating healthy Japanese food too long, but I didn't enjoy it at all. I found the burger greasy and the fries far too salty. I'm hoping it was just a bad McDonalds.

Today I'm going to hit Yonezawa (home of the delicious beef), and then I have some more ambitious travel plans for the rest of the week. But let me briefly talk about the week just past.

On tuesday and wednesday I helped coach a student for a speech contest after school. Though this meant I was working eight to six, I actually enjoyed it. It was at my smallest and most rural school, which I haven't yet had an official tour of duty at. The English teacher there seemed genuinely grateful for my efforts, which felt really good - when you're doing a PhD no-one thanks you for working late. He showered me with compliments for being able to write phonetic symbols on the blackboard. That one undergrad course in linguistics I did back in 2002 is really paying off in spades now. I still don't think speech contests are a good method of English instruction, but I've decided to think of them as being more like an after school drama club that happens to be in a foreign language. When I remembered that actors painstakingly memorise their lines verbatim, speech contests didn't seem like quite such an outrageous and cruel waste of time.

Thursday was 'sketch day' at my school - all classes were canceled and the students were given art supplies and told to paint pictures. I joined in, glad of the opportunity to flex my artistic muscles for the first time in years. I think we were really supposed to paint, but I just stuck with a pencil sketch - a medium I'm more comfortable in. I figured one of the perks of being a teacher is the ability to selectively ignore rules that the students have to follow.

Drawing the picture, I remembered what I used to like about art, and also why I grew to hate it and turn my back on it. It's just so much work for something that could be achieved in seconds using a camera. Still, my picture seemed to go down well with staff and students alike.

On friday I had my most emotional English lesson so far. The textbooks have a curious tendency to use rather bleak material for reading exercises. One example is The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, a story about a leaf's realisation that he will die come Autumn and his eventual acceptance of his place in the cycle of Life. But at least that one has a kind of Zen quality to it; it's nothing on A mother's lullaby - the topic of friday's lesson. This is about the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and tells the story of a girl trying to comfort a young boy whose parents were killed by pretending to be his mother and singing him a lullaby. The boy dies from his injuries but the girl keeps on singing. Eventually she falls asleep and never wakes up. It's harrowing.

I felt more than a little awkward being the only Westerner in the room, though I was glad not to be American. Wisely, my co-teacher had me pretty much sit this one out. Still, I couldn't help feeling deeply guilty, and then getting defensive - 'yeah, but what about Nanjing?' I started thinking. Obviously kids should be taught about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it seems very strange to do this in English as opposed to history classes.

I seem to have inadvertently ended on a downer. Oh well.

(Yes, the title is incredibly weak, but it does have a contrived and obscure double tie-in to the post. I'll probably change it later.)