Now, gentle reader, you are, at this moment, probably a tad puzzled, because a quick look at the calendar will show that Wednesday was the eleventh, not the twelfth. If I took my pictures yesterday (Thursday), that was the twelfth.

Yep. And I only realized that as I wrote the title for today’s post and noted that I had been writing 1/13 on my paperwork all day and…what day was it, anyway?!

I guess that makes this Friday the 13th. Huh. I’m really out of it.

Moving on! Twelve pictures, taken January 12, 2012, showing a typical day.

Good morning! And welcome to all of the snow, all of the time! It’s started snowing fairly regularly right before Christmas and except for a few warm days around the New Year’s weekend, when all of the snow slid off my roof and tried to kill me, none of it has gone away. I used to be pretty on top of clearing the doorway, but I’ve had to let it go for now since I don’t have the tools to chip away the stuff on my steps. In this picture, you can see the path I’ve been trying to maintain, with little success. Between new snow and the wind, most of work is undone by the time I get home. The path doesn’t even go all that far. My neighbors and I have been working hard, but there’s still a 10-yard stretch of high drifts that we despair of.

I’m lucky though, since the drifts form on the south side, away from my door. My neighbor, who was gone for almost all of Christmas and New Year’s never had a chance – he sort of has to clamber out of his house.

Crazy icicles hanging off my roof, along with all of the snow ever.

Back towards my door. I used to get to my car by going between the shed and my house (to the left), but the snow’s thigh deep there, so it’s a no-go until spring.

The next time I buy snow-boots, I’m shooting for calf or thigh height footwear. Actually, after I took this, I went back inside and changed them out for my rain boots, because I was sick of sinking into drifts over my ankles and filling my shoes with snow.

Now, you may be wondering why on Earth I’m wearing tights and a skirt in this weather. Unfortunately, such are the perils of spending 20 minutes a day engaged in snow removal and eight hours in an overheated office.

My neighbor’s bright orange ‘mama dump’ – mama dump-truck. Much more efficient for snow removal than your average snow shovel. Of course, by the time I clued in, the store was sold out.

The pile of snow in front of my house, left by the plow that “clears” the street.

Hiding behind the pile.

The sky behind the Board of Education – looks fairly peaceful, but the wind was blowing like crazy – it hit 19.9m/s (about 45mph) that day.

What I spent most of the day doing – studying kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese). I’m studying for a test two weeks hence and am trying to take advantage of school being out to cram as much practice in as possible.

The path again around 5PM, with some wind damage. You can see where the mailman flailed his way to my neighbor’s, after leaving the path.

Someone else, the propane man most likely, had decided to chance the path between the house and the shed. I was alarmed to discover this hanging out there:

Probably need to try and knock that down before it kills someone.

Kids: This is kind of weird…

Maki-san: It’s not weird! It’s traditional!

Me: Covering a bare tree branch with styrofoam balls, plastic fish and dice is traditional?

Apparently so. The decorations used to be mochi (squishy, chewy rice cakes), but apparently styrofoam isn’t as messy. There was an impromptu decorating session in the lobby this afternoon, including a bunch of fifth graders who had come in from sledding to warm up in the library. Then we tied the poor branch to the ceiling.

Of course, no sooner was it up then were people wondering if we had hung it upside down – branches down, rather than up. There was a brief, fierce debate, including Googling and wondering if we should hang one branch one way and the other the other way. Finally, someone determined that it was traditional locally to hang it branches up, so we began the long process of flipping it over.

I decided to tromp around and take a few pictures. Originally, I was only going to go down to the river so I could get some open shots, then head over to one of the shrines, but the frozen river made me interested in exploring a bit more.

After seeing that, I decided that I really needed to see where it joined up with the ocean.

On the way, I ran into something I’d promised to show – one of the ways Japan deals with the weather. Right now, the wind coming off the Japan Sea is wicked strong – one has to actively stand against it. It’s especially strong coming over open ground, near the rivers for example. Now, the last thing you want when you’re driving along in winter is to be shoved unexpectedly into oncoming traffic, so there are these special fences erected along coastal roads. They’re typical, knee-high barriers most of the year, and then they unfold accordion-style in late-fall to high fences.

From there, I decided to check out the port and maybe get some pictures of the beach. The snow along the path there was almost undisturbed, with these neat scale patterns.

However, I was sick of sinking in up to my ankles and decided to switch to the other side of the road, where the snow looked shallower…

…right. This is me sunk in up to my thighs. Shortly after taking the picture, I sank in up to my waist and shortly after that some wiggling helped me become a head and pairs of arms (one holding the camera out of harm’s way) flailing above the snow. I had stepped into a snow-filled ditch.

I admit the only PG thing running through my head at that point was ‘Darwin Award’.

I wrapped the camera in my hat, set it aside, and then flopped as hard as I could toward the road. From there, all I had to do was worm my way on my belly out of the hole. After that, I walked in the street.

I decided I wasn’t up to going to the port at that point and wandered back into town. A lot of people had set up structures over their plants back in October, to protect them from heavy snowfall.

The plows were out…finally.

Here’s one of the shrine’s in Otobe:

Pretty much no one is around unless there’s a festival. With New Year’s coming up, every will be hanging around until midnight, ready to ring in the new year with the shrine’s bell.

I stopped on the way home to get bread from the bakery and some hot cocoa from a vending machine. We often carry around the hot cans to keeps our hands warm, but I must have looked a little odd holding mine against the tip of my nose.

One last picture, of the Otobe cliffs in their winter finery:

A couple of weeks ago, I was at my littlest elementary school (18 students, grades 1-6) for an afternoon class. This is rather unusual, since I usually end up at this school early, early in the morning. I actually prefer that – it took me until sophomore year of college to realize that ‘Early Bird’ doesn’t have to be a dirty word (phrase?), but I have embraced it fully.

The Japanese school day, through junior high, has six class periods (45 minutes each in elementary, 50 in junior high). I was actually surprised to learn this because starting in fifth grade, I had seven periods a day. School went until 3PM as a matter of course, 2:30PM on Fridays. In Otobe, only the junior high school goes for six periods every day (usually). The sixth graders are out after fifth period at least once per week, it seems, and the first graders never have sixth period. This makes the small elementary schools interesting in the afternoons, since the class are combined 1st/2nd, 3rd/4th, and 5th/6th – I’m used to small classes, but it’s odd when one half of the class goes home early and you happen upon a teacher going over a new math lesson with his two second graders.

Anyway, after I finished up this fifth period class, the fifth and sixth graders all immediately started putting on aprons and masks, like they do before serving lunch in the classroom. I was actually deeply confused about the time for a moment, before they marched out of the classroom and into the home ec room.

Which was full of buckets of dead fish.

Probably not something you’d see in America everyday.

The kids were pretty game to try cutting up the fish properly, though they all went pale when the man who had come to teach them explained that the best way to get a grip on the slippery fish was to grasp the head with their left hand and punch their thumb through the eye socket.

Y(fifth-grade girl): Teacher, do we really…?

Teacher: Would you rather slice open your hand?

They started off pretty well, considering that the fisherman who had showed them how to cut them open did it in about 45 seconds and only vaguely differentiated between what fish innards should be saved and which should be discarded. This is why I don’t eat protein prepared by anyone under the age of 14.

The biggest complaint I heard was about how cold the fish were. Okay, and about sticking thumbs into eye sockets. I snapped a few pictures and left before anyone lost any fingers.

And then there’s today…

Section Chief: Good morning.
Everyone: Good morning.
Section Chief: Nothing really specific today. M-san (my supervisor) is taking a vacation day. The Head’s going to a meeting later today, he leaves at 10AM.
Community center section chief: The community center opens tomorrow at 10AM. The elementary school has a presentation on Sunday, Section Chief, BOE Head and I will be attending.
Section Chief: Anything, Head?
Head: Nah, not really.
Everyone: *goes to sit down*
Section Chief: Ooh, I just remembered!
Everyone: *pops back up again*
Section Chief: N-san’s back is still bothering him, that’s why he hasn’t been in this week. Looks like he’ll have to miss a lot of days in November too, until he’s better. That’s all.
Everyone: *goes to sit down*
Head: It’s really unfortunate…
Everyone: *stands up again*
Head:…let’s try to be careful about our health, everyone. Eat well so you don’t get sick and be careful about strenuous activity.
Everyone: *keep standing, glancing around at each other, and then faux-nonchalantly sit down again*

Here’s the bed, with the dry-cleaned sheets and blanket. There’s also a dresser to my right.

Here’s my wardrobe and closet:

The closet is big enough to sleep in, but not great for hanging up clothes, hence the wardrobe.

Here’s the room now – even though these pictures were taken back in September, it’s still basically the same…few more blankets on the bed, though.

The bed’s kind of neat – there’s an attached shelf, some drawers, and a reading light. I keep some cat manga up there, along with my stuffies.

Top of the dresser, with a few pictures and my wolves.

There were three lengths/types offered during the tounament – a 4.8km ‘short course’, a 7km ‘challenge course’, and a 6.1km ‘hiking course’. Most people ended up doing the hiking course (because it took a fun route through the hills near town) or the short course (for the wimps, including me, and most people over the age of 85). The short course folks walked out to a spring a couple of kilometers inland from the sea, had a drink, and walked back. It was a really nice day.

I spent most of the first half near the back, with one of the first grade teachers and some of her students. We were closely followed by a bus, in case anyone dropped from the grueling pace (harhar). There was one moment that I wish I could have caught on film, when the group encountered one of only two items of wildlife on the walk – a worm. All three little girls stopped short, with little gasps of horror, before they realized they were in no danger. (the other item of wildlife was a dead mouse – no shocked response).

The leaves haven’t quite started turning here yet.

When we got back, there was hot fish soup for everyone to enjoy. Most of the adults ate and then flopped on the grass, while the children got a second wind and threw themselves at the playground equipment.

The soup brought up an interesting point – the Japanese people, in general, are pretty proud of enjoying quite a few edible items that most Westerners would decline. However, I gained some brownie points that afternoon for gulping down all of the fish in the soup. Apparently, the preparers had accidentally included a few unpopular varieties, and my view that ‘fish is fish, especially white fish’ was considered unusual.

Considering how many ‘returning from an unexpected hiatus’ blog posts I’ve read in the last ten years, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at how easy it was to fall out of the blogging habit, but I am. Every time I thought about posting for the past month, I felt more like stomping my foot and throwing a fit.

It wasn’t like I didn’t have the time. Because of how my schedule works, I spend hours reading the news or books on Kindle each week, with a relatively small amount of time dedicated to actually being in class or prepping for class. Since I’m only responsible for the activities we do in class, it’s rare for me to spend more than 30 minutes per junior high school lesson, between paging through my educational resources, selecting an activity, modifying it appropriately for age level/time limit/grammar points, and actually producing it. Since I’ve started introducing them to tongue twisters as a warm-up, prep time has shot down.

Also, even though I have time, it’s all at work. I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to write with people chatting and answering the phone around me. I’ve also become a bit accustomed to my life here – it can be hard to put myself outside a situation enough to analyze it and write about it. This is my everyday life, why do I need to break out the camera again?

So, to break myself back in, a slightly related topic:

When I arrived, one of the first questions I was asked was ‘where’s your hometown?’. While many people in Japan obviously still live in or near the town they were born in, many more have moved to the larger cities or have been transferred elsewhere due to their jobs. Your hometown is where you were born, where you’re parents still live, and where you return for holidays in August and January. Even in a small town like Otobe, people keep track of which smaller unit of Otobe you’re from – Midorimachi, Motomachi, Sakaehama, Toyohama, Himekawa, etc. It determines where and with who you went to elementary school, your phone number when the office can’t remember*, and where you volunteer for traffic safety week.

I, of course, claimed Tucson as my hometown. Not many Americans would dispute this – I wasn’t born there, but I moved there before I started school and stayed through high school graduation. My mother lives there, it’s where I returned for holiday breaks during college. I vote there, register my car there, know every neighborhood and shop. If I have a hometown, it is Tucson.

A few weeks later, I was explaining to my co-workers how I still felt at home in a seaside town like Otobe despite my Arizona upbringing because Otobe is similar to Narragansett, RI, where I spent part of every childhood summer. I broke out my large classroom map of the US to show them Rhode Island, and mentioned in passing that I was born in Hartford.

This caused a sudden bout of confused consternation. Hartford? But you said your hometown was Tucson.

It is, I replied, I was only born in Hartford. We left when I was six months old and I don’t remember it one bit.

It took a surprisingly long amount of time to convince them that even though I was born in Hartford, and my grandparents lived nearby, it shouldn’t be considered my hometown. For them, that was all was needed to qualify Hartford as my hometown. I had to explain that most Americans would think it was silly to claim a city I barely knew (silly, and a bit pretentious, if I had gone around claiming that in southern Arizona), and more closely associate a concept of ‘hometown’ with high school or school, at least. It can be even more fluid in the US – a ‘hometown’ can be wherever you are living currently, if you are in a sufficiently strange and distant situation. If you’ve only lived in Sacramento a month, it’s still ‘where you’re from’ on a business trip in Australia.

*This produced a pretty amazing feat, in my eyes at least: Within Otobe, you only have to dial the last six digits of your phone number, and the first two refer to your area (Midorimachi for me). Last week, the office needed to contact someone, but had lost her number. Using the area she lived in and the phone number of someone they knew lived nearby, plus a little bit of house counting, they produced 4-5 likely numbers…and found her on the second try. Wow.

Up until about two weeks ago, I lived in the Board of Education room. Now I leave 2-4 times per week to teach at my schools, but I have to report in here in the morning and come back after my lessons are over.

Here’s the office. It’s arranged with two sets of six desks each, both headed by a section chief’s desks. I’m in the closer clump of desks, at the one that has a bag on the chair. The main door is directly behind me and the door to the board of ed chief’s office is over my left shoulder. I’ve trimmed out my section chief, who was the only other person in as early as the day I took this. I have yet to beat him to work in the morning, I suspect he sleeps under his desk. I’m fairly sure my clump of desks deals with the actual school education side of our work (dealing with me, organizing the school bus and school lunches, etc), while the other deals with more community outreach and education type things (after school enrichment, computer classes, the library). But don’t quote me on that.

There’s a refrigerator in the back corner, with drinks freely available. Barley tea and iced coffee are always available, sometimes juice and soda as well. The TV on the back wall, on the right, is used to monitor the CCTV footage from the gym or to check and see if the weather’s going to get noticeably worse.

Work starts for everyone officially at around 8:30, but almost everyone is there and working by 8:20. The day officially kicks off when the board of ed chief comes out of his office (anywhere between 8:30 and 8:40) to start the morning meeting. Everyone stands and says good morning, my section chief outlines any special events going on today, notes anyone who is going to be out for the day and why (illness, business trip, occasionally vacation), and then hands it over to the section chief, who adds whatever he needs to, before the board of ed chief says anything he needs to. Then work begins in earnest. It’s not unusual for both section chiefs and the board of ed chief to basically say ‘Nothing special today, meeting’s over’, and have the whole thing done in less than 10 seconds.

Work is pretty serious seeming in the morning. People are running around, dealing with whatever work came in overnight, making phone calls, or driving over to the schools or town office to deliver paperwork and other materials. Visitors come into the building needing to use various classroom spaces or to see the board of ed chief. The office ladies make endless copies, serve tea to the visitors, distribute omiyage, and make sure all the paperwork has been seen, signed, and stamped before going where it needs to.

A note on omiyage, or souvenirs – they’re what you bring back from a trip, usually to thank your coworkers for picking up the slack while you were gone, but there are the more usual ‘my brother went to Tokyo Disneyland and all I got was this stupid t-shirt’ souvenirs as well. They’re easily available at every sort of ‘destination’, often right there in the train station for grabbing as you head back home. For coworkers, food is the norm, and you can easily find individually wrapped nibbles packaged in sets of 12-20. It’s rare that a day goes by without one of the office ladies handing out some sort of regional cookie or snack from someone’s business trip or vacation. (As I write this, a little pile of cookies is forming at my right elbow)

This is my desktop. I am the keeper of the section’s scotch tape, thank you very much. I keep pictures and calendars from the cat comic books at the convenience store. I thought this month’s looked a bit like our cat Mindy. In the upper right corner is a pile of books – library books that I’m battling through, Planet Eigo (a reference for every ESL game ever), and usually whatever Japanese review I’m doing that day.

I spend most of the day studying Japanese, making materials for my next class, and keeping up with the HPKCHC Ravelry. The JET programme offers a distinctly mediocre Japanese correspondence course, but it doesn’t kick off until November. I signed up for the Advanced level, so I’m using my predecessor’s predecessor’s unused Intermediate textbooks to review (told you they were mediocre). I also use Anki to review kanji and a grammar book I brought from the US to go over stuff from first and second years of college.

Lunch is an hour, I eat it with one of the office ladies and her friend from the clinic. We watch Waratte Iitomo! (It’s Okay to Laugh!), a variety show with a host who holds the Guinness World Record for longest continuous hosting of a TV show (it’s been running 5 days a week since 1982). The host and guests pay a lot of games, which is good, because otherwise the content would probably fly right over my head.

After lunch, it’s back to work for another 3.5 hours (for me) or some-undefined-period-of-time-that-I-haven’t-yet-determined (for everyone else). Work seems a lot more relaxed in the afternoon. The section chiefs are more relaxed about personal conversations, internet searches become less business like, etc. An interesting note about cell phones – I never had a real office job in the states, but I would have expected that using them for personal business would be a bit of a no-no. Here, receiving and sending texts (though not excessively) is permissible, as is taking the occasional personal call.

The building we’re in has a lot more than just the Board of Education. As previously mentioned, there’s the library, the museum, the auditorium, the ballroom, plus a number of meeting rooms and classroom spaces. We’re also right next door to the gym and the town pool.

Our building, the Otobe town community center/public hall.

The taxidermied bear I mentioned before.

The other bear (with its cub) in another part of the hall. I eat lunch on the couch just visible on the left.

Speaking of lunch…

A variety of items that made up lunch and part of breakfast that day. From the left, there’s soy sauce hard boiled eggs (which turned out to be a bit gross), a tuna rice ball (carefully wrapped so that the seaweed does not touch the rice ball until you unwrap it), a fruit cup (banana flavored, ick), a chocolate cream roll, a donut (this is my favorite donut from the convenience store – pretty much fried perfection), a coke, and grape Calpis (which turned out to be ‘calorie-off’ and therefore full of nasty artificial sweeteners). You win some, you lose some.

Finally, a picture of my feet wearing my official work shoes:

It is fun to see people shuffling around in business-wear with slippers and sandals.

Alright, first up is from Sus: “How Otobe differs from your other homes in Japan.”

First, a quick review of where I’ve been in Japan. In 2004, I visited Tokyo, Hakone, and Kyoto with my mother. In 2005, I stayed with a host family in Nishiizu, Shizuoka for a few weeks. In 2006, I returned there for a week, on a trip that also included Tokyo and Kyoto. Finally, in 2008 I studied abroad in Nagoya for four months, also visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Takayama, and Shirakawa-go. Of all of these, I consider myself to have actually “lived” in Nishiizu and Nagoya.

Otobe is obviously different from Nagoya. Nagoya is Japan’s third largest metropolitan center, with an international airport, department stores, universities, and a subway system (as well as a major port). Otobe’s claim to transportation fame is a major federally-maintained road running through it and most shopping beyond daily needs is down in towns further south or east. Nagoya might as well be Saint Paul, MN with Japanese people for all the differences. Right now, the weather is pretty similar – warm and humid and almost September, but I suspect our winter will not be as mild as Nagoya’s.

The differences between Nishiizu and Otobe were slower to come to light. First, I’d like to teach you a new word – “inaka”. It’s means rural, or countryside, but it also has a distinct flavor of ‘the sticks’.

When you apply to the JET programme, there’s a place on the form where you can indicate any placement requests you may have, whether it’s urban, suburban, or rural, or if you even have a specific prefecture or city you’d like to be sent to. There’s a bit of a myth that JET won’t place you in a city – false! You’re almost definitely not going to get Tokyo or one of the other largest cities, but Sapporo, Kyoto, Fukuoka City are all possibilities.

There’s also a lot of chat about whether JET cares about any specific requests you may make, or whether you should make them at all. Personally, I think that it never hurts to ask, especially if you add that you would really be happy anywhere (if you wouldn’t be, either don’t apply or lie). My theory as to whether they listen? I think they do as long as 1) it’s convenient for them, 2) they actually have spots open where you want to go, 3) they think you’d be okay there, and 4) the contracting organization wants you. That last one may sound weird, but if the CO is in a large city and the only housing available is a one-room apartment in the teachers’ dorm, they may not want the JET who is bringing their family along.

Personally, I was one of the lucky ones: Hokkaido – anywhere was my first choice and I got it. However, I’ve talked to other Hokkaido JETs who were bewildered about their placement. They’d requested Kyushu (the southernmost of the Japanese home islands) or some other warm location, only to end up in the land of snow, ice, and skiing.

Anyway, enough JET speculation! Basically, what I’m getting at is that placements are discussed endlessly and locations are usually broken down into four categories: Urban, whether a location is suburban enough (depending on which way, rural or urban, the JET was leaning), rural, and those rare ‘Yes, you are the only foreigner on the island and the boat only runs to the mainland 3 times a week’ postings. Since Otobe fell into squarely into the rural category, I spent most of orientation and the first few weeks being reminded that I was in the inaka. It’s the middle of nowhere! People speak in strange dialects! Vegetables mysteriously appear at your door! Public transportation is a myth!

I was so indoctrinated that it took me until a few days ago to realize that, actually, Otobe wasn’t that inaka, especially once I compared it to Nishiizu. Then it became downright cosmopolitan! Otobe has three convenience stores and two traffic lights! More than one elementary school! Hakodate is only an hour and a half away by car, whereas in Nishiizu, you’d have to drive twice as long to get somewhere half Hakodate’s size.

Helps keep things in perspective.

More General Differences

No lie, there’s a lot to be stressed about when you’ve moved to a foreign country. However, one of the biggest stress relievers has been living on my own. There’s no Japanese host family to worry about offending or putting out. Don’t get me wrong, I think home-stays are wonderful, but transitioning from a college student who takes care of most of her own daily needs to living as a family with people you didn’t know until last month can be tough.

Now I can decide to leave the breakfast dishes until after work, or move all the furniture around, and do the laundry when I want, without worrying about destroying the family washing machine. Having a job also relieves a lot of pressure – if I broke my washing machine, it would suck, but I’d be able to replace it.

Though I’d rather spend the money on books.

(this is from a trip to Esashi – to think that before driving up, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to find the bookstore)