This is a video I took a few minutes after the major earthquake. The rumbling you hear and the curtains swaying despite there being no breeze in the room are all signs of the aftershock.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTEuzoKLnOw

Sorry I haven't updated in such a long time. Things have been crazy these past few months. I hope things settle soon so I can write more in here.

I'm picking up right where the last entry left off.

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Things in my life have become hectic for various reasons, but I thought I'd talk about the major earthquake that happened on March 11th.

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Sorry I haven't updated in a while. The earthquake happened and things were crazy for a bit. I'm not in an area that was too badly affected by it. I felt it and everything but it was ok, I guess. There have been earthquakes every day since then, though. I keep wondering if another big one will hit. Stressful. Very stressful.

Then my job got flipped for next year where I'd be only at elementary schools rather than my beloved junior high school. So I'm currently on a quest to beg my company to beg the BOE of the town where I teach to reconsider this somehow. It's an incredible long-shot, and currently contributing to my stress level that much more.

So I'm stressed. Very, very stressed. Very.

I'll update more when things calm down someday.

Today there was a school assembly for the kids. Last year the kids gathered around this time of the year to watch a PSA about not doing drugs. It was a pretty ridiculous PSA video that involved talking globes discussing the effects of drugs in an overly-skewed perspective ("Once you try drugs, you will become addicted for life").

This year we all gathered in the gym, and I expected to see the same thing.

Instead, there was a stage with a raised platform on it. On the platform was a pillow and a microphone on a little stand.

A few ninth grade boys behind me snickered to see this. I turned to them and asked what was going on.

"Do you know rakugo?" one of them said.

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Work has been stressing me out lately. The teachers, especially.

The English teacher for the 8th grade kids is pregnant and leaving soon, but she's been slowly driving me insane. She's a woman who feels the need to tell me every single thing she's doing in class, even if it's the same thing we do almost every class. For example, my reading aloud from the text. She still feels the need to pull me aside and tell me that's what's happening even though it's about as obvious as saying "Hey, class is going to take place today." 

She also will snap at me for the most random things. For example, during one class a few of the boys did something really ridiculous. They opened the windows to the classroom and put their bookbags out on the porch out there. I don't know why. She was furious at them, which makes sense. But then she snapped about it at me. I don't know what I did wrong since I wasn't involved. It's also not my job to punish the kids; my company states that I can't since it's not my culture. So I've never, for the past two years, punished the kids. And yet now she seems upset at me for it even though she's known me since September and knows I haven't punished them this whole time. That's her job as their real teacher. She also yelled at me for talking to the kids and appearing to be too friendly with them. Again, it's my job to be friends with the kids so they'll be willing to talk to me. I'm like an ambassador to foreigners for these kids so I have to be friendly. But she hates that and yells at me for it.

Then there's an old math teacher lady for the 9th graders who yelled at me for talking to the 9th grade kids during cleaning time. I had a bunch of 9th grade kids outside with me sweeping, and they would talk to me (always in English) as we swept. But then, for the past month, this old lady's been coming out yelling at them for talking to me. Finally the vice principal called me into his office and told me I'm not allowed to sweep outside. He was apologetic about it, but he said I should probably stay away from the 9th graders during cleaning time. So I've been out in the wood shop class with the 8th graders cleaning.

Last there's the 9th grade English teacher. She yelled at me a few days ago for the 9th graders talking to me during class while they were working on a worksheet. She particularly yelled at a few of the students who'd been talking, saying it's a really important time when they should be studying for high school entrance exams and not just chatting away. This makes sense to me, but they were the ones who'd started talking to me and it'd been an interesting question. And then about five minutes later she started talking to a bunch of the 9th grade kids seated in a different side of the room. Not about English or anything related to school whatsoever. The kid whom she'd yelled at called me over to him and said, "She's talking louder than I was." Great example to set for the kids.

So these three women are currently driving me crazy. The pregnant one is leaving by the end of February to have the kid, but the two older ladies are sticking around for an indefinite period of time. It's stressing me out at work, constantly wondering what actions I'll do that will set them off again. My job, I THOUGHT, was to get the kids to like me so they'll talk to me in English and learn to like English and possibly foreigners. These three teachers don't like me doing that, though, apparently.

I'm really frustrated.

I just got a ticket to the February 11th Akanishi Jin concert! I'm incredibly excited!

Whenever I head home from Tokyo, I always make sure to go via Ueno Station. There are trains that go directly from my station all the way to Ueno, and since Ueno is the last stop, the train is empty. This boosts my chance of having a seat up 90 percent from choosing another station along the way.

I also like to choose the platform that has trains running not just to my stop, but beyond it to stations that could take a good five hours from Ueno to arrive at. Places like Mito. These trains are equipped with bathrooms and seats that face one another, giving you the feel like you're riding an actual train rather than a subway.

I like the seats that face one another enough that I'm willing to wait an extra ten minutes to get one of these long-haul trains.

The wait is always intense, at least for me, right before the doors to the train open. I eye my choice spot (a seat facing in the direction the train is heading with a window perpendicular to it), and then almost shove people out of my way to get onto it.

When I took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Shin Osaka Station, people literally did shove people out of their way to get on the train. It was not a pleasant experience.

Anyway I managed to grab my favorite seat last night on the train, and that pleased me tremendously.

But then a happy couple nabbed the seats facing me. This meant a good 45 minutes of watching them hug each other and tease each other. I hate watching this, and try to avoid it whenever possible. Japan is pretty good about not outwardly showing signs of affection. I think it's ridiculous how strict this can get (as in holding hands is seen as embarrassing to do in public), but I like that I don't see people making out all the time either.

At one point the girlfriend said she had to use the bathroom, so she handed her boyfriend the purse and left.

It was dark enough outside that the windows had become mirrors. I stared out, my headphones in place, and indirectly watched the boyfriend.

What would he do now that he was alone? How would he act now that she wasn't there? 

For a few seconds he did nothing. Then he quietly unzipped the front part of his girlfriend's purse. I thought maybe he was rooting around for gum since she'd tried to feed that to him a few minutes earlier.

Instead, he pulled out her cell phone, and he opened it. I hoped he was just checking the time, but if he was, that apparently involved pressing buttons and staring at the screen for a while. He finally slipped it back into her purse, and a few seconds later she appeared again.

Isn't that odd, I thought. She's willing to extend her faith in him by giving him her purse like that, but he's not willing to do the same in return.

It was with darkened eyes that I watched them continue to act lovey-dovey (by Japanese standards) until my stop.

During the winter break, one of my eighth grade girls (whom I've named Miley in previous posts) sent me a New Year's card. Like how North Americans must send Christmas cards to everyone they know, the Japanese must send New Years cards.

On the card she noted that she was going to be in Paris for a few days. She'd never gone, and was really excited.

So when I ran into her again at school I asked her how she liked Paris.

She frowned.

"Too expensive,"  she said.

"Did you like the Eiffel Tower?" 

"No, I didn't," she said without offering a reason. 

"Did you like the food?" I said.

"No! It was bland," she said. "Bad, bad food. And too expensive." 

I kind of scratched my head.

"What did you like about Paris?" I said.

She didn't hesitate when she responded, smiling:

"The supermarkets! They were very cheap! I love supermarkets!"

I was eating lunch with one of the eighth grade classes. I ended up sitting next to a girl who is a swimming legend in our school. She's the only one in our school on the swim team, but she has won state championships.

So I asked her a few questions.

"When did you first start swimming?" I said.

She had to have help having that question translated.

"Four," she said, holding up four fingers for some reason.

Ok.

"Why did you start?" 

A few more minutes passed wherein everyone at the table banded together to figure out what I'd just said, and how to answer it. Answering a "Why" question is difficult in any language.

"Fun," she said.

"It's fun?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

I was expecting her to say something like her parents had made her do it or she wanted to win a medal, which I would've heard her first say in Japanese.

I do this a lot, actually. When I want to hear the answer, sometimes even though I know it's a question that maybe is too difficult for them to answer, I ask it. This is because they then ask their friends "How do I say [whatever their answer is] in English?" I also get to hear them think aloud and choose if they want to bother telling me an honest answer or not.

For example: "What's your favorite manga?"

Boy [in Japanese]: "I don't really read manga. How do you say that in English?"

Boy 2 [in Japanese]: "Just name some popular manga title and she won't bug you anymore."

Boy [in Japanese]: "Ok." [In English] "I like One Piece." 

I nod politely like I am completely fooled by this, and mentally note that the boy doesn't actually like manga.

Anyway, she simply said that swimming is fun, and so she does it.

Next question: "Do you have a pool at your house?" 

She didn't need a translation for this one. I was so pleased that she could correctly translate it into Japanese that I almost missed the astounded comments from everyone else in the lunch group.

"Did she just ask her if she has a pool?"

"What kind of a weird question is that?" 

"That's so strange."

It was like I'd asked if the girl enjoys swimming on land as much as in water.

And then I remembered that I have never seen any house in Japan with a pool in the backyard. Ever. Part of me thought that since she's so hard-core at swimming that her parents would install one. My school where I teach is, after all, in the middle of no where. Space isn't so much of an issue here.

But apparently it's still incredibly unheard of to have a pool in one's backyard in Japan. I still have so much to learn.