Hi everybody!

 

How are you all doing? I’m demanding updates! Send them along!

 

It’s evening here after a perfect day in Matsue – not too hot, not too cold, the sun shining and a soft breeze blowing. I can see a small corner of the hazy rose-and-gold sunset from my window. I’m relaxing after dinner – pork chops, rice and peas, nothing really unusual today.

 

I went for my regular Monday bike ride, up into the foothills north of Matsue, then back to the area near the castle and across the bridges, dodging fleets of young students in summer uniforms and round white bike helmets going home from school. 

 

Not a lot happened this week. I did, however, go to my first Professional Development Workshop this week. I’m mastering the skill of taking the train; it’s ridiculously easy, even with my pathetic Japanese. I bought my ticket for Okayama and waited with Taeko on the train platform. We chatted for a while on the train, but then Taeko took a separate seat on the train and promptly fell asleep with her ipod and sleep mask. I sat at the window and watched the passing countryside. The first time I took this train, coming to Matsue for the first, was at night, so I couldn’t see the scenery – just dim outlines of hills and mountains, then blackness. This time, it was a sunny morning in early June, and the view was lovely. We headed east toward Yonago, then south. Near Yonago, I looked up at Mount Daisen, the tallest of the mountains near Matsue. On fine days, you can see the peak of Daisen from Matsue. In the winter, it is nearly invisible, and I finally saw it after I had been here over a month. I was dumbfounded to see a white-peaked, ghostly mountain suddenly appear where previously there had been nothing. Daisen is the spot to go in winter for skiing and snowboarding, and apparently there is also a four-hour hike you can take in summer. I want to take that hike. On the day of the PDW, Daisen loomed close above the train, silhouetted by the morning sun and capped with a puff of bluish clouds. From my seat I could look into backyard gardens, a mix of neat rows of earth and wild-looking shrubs, flowers and hedges. I spotted squash, corn and some greens growing, and the bright bobbing heads of marigolds. The first tiny agisai (hydrangea) were blooming, white and pale blue. Houses gave way to rice fields, with pale green tufts of rice emerging in neat rows from the shallow water. No bit of land is wasted; even a tiny, triangular piece of land in the crook of the road is flooded and planted with rice. Here and there a snowy white heron stood still as a statue in the fields, breaking up the greenness of the palette, or a crow would wheel and land on a patch of dry earth. Rusty tin sheds in various states of disrepair stood near small dirt roads, and miniature white pickup trucks with blocky cabins waited for the farmers who worked their fields in oversized rubber boots. Here and there we passed greenhouses and the skeletons of greenhouses, still in use despite their lack of a roof.

 

The train flirted with the many rivers we passed, veering away till they were almost out of sight, then sliding close again so I could see the broad, flat, rocky riverbeds and the amber water. In places where the river was deep enough, flat-bottomed rowboats were pulled up against the shore. There were some lone fly fishermen standing stock still in midstream - like the herons, patiently waiting. And on the rocks, a handful of cormorants sat in the sum, some of them holding their wings out to dry them.

 

We moved into more mountainous areas with fewer houses, passing mills and dams near the riverbeds. The landscape and houses here haven’t changed much in a hundred years. Some of the cliff faces have been reinforced with honeycombed concrete patterns or covered with stiff nets, to prevent landslides. We passed through more tunnels, where my ears popped. The sugi (Japanese cypress) were dark patches of arrow-straight conifers on the mountainsides, near pale green, feathery stands of bamboo, like giant ferns. Here and there, high on the hills and almost a part of them, I could see a small graveyard of stone pillars, or an almost hidden altar or family shrine.

 

We came down from the mountains and into farmland again. Here, reflective tape glinted in the sun, black garbage bags fluttered from the tops of poles and the effigies of owls were employed, as at home, to keep the birds from plundering the tender sprouting seedlings. In one garden, someone had rigged up a trio of parasols to protect tubs of young plants from the heat of the sun. Windows and doors of houses and shops were covered with long woven mats of grasses to protect the inhabitants from the afternoon sun. Here the hilly land was terraced with stone and concrete walls to create gardens. It was difficult to tell the men and women who cared for the land apart, as they worked in similar light cotton tunics and trousers, with broad-brimmed straw sunhats. Some women wore white bonnets reminiscent of “Little House on the Prairie”, with aprons over brightly printed blouses. I saw one bent woman weeding, wearing a basket on her back. This could be a different century.

 

Finally, as we began to approach Okayama, pre-fabricated apartment dwellings of concrete, metal and wood, replaced the farmhouses. Many had pots of flowers, though, and a few were brightly painted, a cheery contrast to their stark neighbours. And before I knew it, we were getting off in the familiar surroundings of Okayama Station, which I hadn’t seen in almost six months. We passed people who also worked for AEON, also arriving from all over west Japan, but I felt too shy to start a conversation. So Taeko and I and one of her co-workers from Izumo caught a taxi to AEON headquarters.

 

I won’t go into a huge amount of detail about the meeting, but it was interesting. The foreign teachers had a Japanese lesson in the form of an AEON lesson, taught by Itami-kaicho, a slender woman in her fifties with short black hair. It was a great opportunity to step into our students’ shoes and experience an AEON lesson. Plus, I learned how to compare things. (Eg. “wain no ho ga biru yori oishii desu”, or, “Wine is more delicious than beer.” No joke; this was the first example we were given. Welcome to Japan.) There was one poor girl who had been in Japan for three weeks; the Japanese lesson was pretty hard for her. I met a lot of AEON teachers that day, including the unforgettable Shaniqua Bizzell. A big, black powerhouse of a woman from North Carolina with a fabulous southern accent, Shaniqua is the kind of teacher I would love to have. I wonder how her students feel; some must find her terrifying.

 

We then had a lesson from Tim and Mimi on how to teach lower-level grammar classes, which was really helpful. I already put some of the ideas to use this week, and want to continue. Then, we talked about tanninsei, which is a very important concept at AEON and one which sets it apart from other English conversation schools. The concept is basically that a teacher is directly responsible for her students, knows her students very well and is constantly working to improve the students under her direct care. You might be going, “Well, duh!” but the Japanese word has a lot of nuances. We practiced learning information about students and listening for and correcting errors in their English.

 

Afterwards I went to an izakaya with some of the other teachers and had dinner and some beer, but we all went our separate ways and caught trains home by 9pm. I slept a little on the train, but found it kind of uncomfortable. Back in Matsue at 11:20, I bid farewell to Taeko and went home, stopping briefly on the Kunibiki Bridge to listen to the spring peeper chorus. It’s a little heavy on the sopranos, with the cicadas singing a buzzy descant, but recently some bullfrogs have been providing a booming bass. Beautiful. I imagine those hundreds of tiny frogs clinging to the rice plants, below me on the island under the bridge. I also saw some small boats in the water, lit with small lamps and flashlights – night fishermen pursuing the suzuki. Suzuki are a kind of fish, one of the seven treasures of Lake Shinji. This is the best time of year to catch them. I’ve seen fishermen on Matsue-Ohashi, the oldest bridge, at night, with their rods and bicycles. They fish in clusters, the old men together and apart from the young men. The old men are quiet while they fish, but the young men are less patient and apt to horse around a bit.

 

The rainy season is almost upon us. It has already started in some southern parts of Japan. I guess it should start in a week or two, and last about three or four weeks, until mid-July. Some people say it’s not that bad, and that it doesn’t usually rain that hard. We’ve already had a remarkable thunderstorm within the last couple of weeks. It woke me with a massive crack that shook the house at 5am. Now, normally I like thunderstorms, and I sat up to look out my balcony window at the bright flashes of lightning and rain bucketing down. But, when the rumbling became stronger and the flashes became too bright to look at, I remembered too many stories of people getting killed by lightning, and I shut my balcony door, pulled my futon away from the window and pulled my blankets over my head to try to get a little sleep. But the storm seemed to be ping-ponging back and forth between the mountains, and wouldn’t go away. Everyone was talking about it the next day, except for one remarkable student who slept through the whole thing.

 

Last year, the rainy season culminated with the Ohashi River (you know, the one I live almost next to) flooding its banks and causing a lot of damage in town. I saw pictures of the waist-deep water in the downtown area and the residential area west of the lake. Kaya was flooded then, and the water stopped just short of AEON’s doors. Sounded like a real mess.

 

I had an interesting experience with one of my students last week. Megumi is studying English literature at Shimane University (she’s the one trying to synopsise To Kill a Mockingbird and A Christmas Carol). She’s also studying Shakespeare, and she brought me the first fourteen lines of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech in the hopes I could throw some light on it for her. Here it is:

 

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life -

 

Wow. Well, it was a real challenge to try to explain “shuffle off this mortal coil”, but I did my best. Megumi and I talked about it for forty minutes or so, and I think I helped her. It’s very hard to try to explain Hamlet. But my experience looking at the text was interesting; I felt like I was reading a personal letter from an old friend. I also felt like I knew what I was talking about. Megumi asked a lot of questions, but I thought I answered them well. I felt almost like a real teacher.

 

That’s it so far. I have to do my Japanese homework tonight, so “miles to go before I sleep.” I’ll write again soon, with more trivial minutia of my life to keep you entertained. As I said before, send me updates!

 

Talk to you soon –

 

Sarah