Visit from David

David is in Sendai for two weeks, visiting from Waga Waga, Australia. David is a poet and university professor who was here a year ago as a one-year guest faculty member at Miyagi Gakuin University. During that time, we frequently met after my Thursday morning class and talked about poetry over coffee. David was very incouraging about my efforts to write fibs.

Last night David and five others of the usual gang went to an Izakaya to eat, drink, and talk. During that very enjoyable evening, I tried out the camera in my cell phone, the one I will take on the Henro pilgrimage, under the difficult lighting in the little room that we occupied. The following two poitraits of David resulted.


The final picture shows Ian on the left and Gerry on the right. Gerry, who I do not think has shown up on this blog before, is a Scotish fly fisherman who plays the bagpipes but makes his living teaching English. As with the rest of us, his wife is Japanese.


In many Izakaya, the floor consists of tatami mats and the customers sit at low tables. This one has a feature that we all particularly like - there is a whole in the floor under the table so you actually sit as you would in a chair, not cross legged as on tatami. Also because the room was very small, the walls were immediately behind your back and you could used them as back rests.

I did not take a picture but a fairly disturbing feature of this particularly Izakaya was that the floors in the halls were made from some sort of transparent material, below which there was sand and objects that made it look like the bottom of the ocean. Thus, you felt like you were walking on water, or maybe air, a very eerie and uncomfortable feeling but interesting.

The joy of giving

A month or so ago a little girl, Anjyu, who lives on the first floor of our building was visiting with her mother. She was very interested in some of my pictures that we have hanging in the living room. Because of this, Masayo got out some of my pictures that are put away in boxes - hopefully, I will start selling them next year. Anyway, Anjyu saw a picture of a tree that I had drawn and very quietly said that she would like to have it. I said that I would think about making her a special one.

The original picture was a single round tree with flowers and individually drawn leaves, based on a photo from Europe. I had placed a birdhouse on the trunk and put my name and the date over the door.

When I thought about a picture for Anjyu, I realized that her younger brother had been there, too, so I decided to make a picture with two trees and a clothes line between them. On the clothes line there would be shirts with the names of the two children, Anjyu and Shui. I added a sign post with my name and the date to complete the picture.

Last night Anjyu and her mother came to our apartment to get the picture. After I gave the picture to her, she just stood and stared at it. Her mother put it away in the box that came with the frame, and Anjyu calmly opened it again so she could continue staring.

However, I think that I got more out of the act of creating the picture and giving it to her than she did from receiving it. It felt incredibly good!

This is a photo of the picture.

Tohoku Gakuin University

On Tuesdays I teach at Tohoku Gakuin University. This is the school that Naomi graduated from a couple of years ago, but she was in the Cultural and Linguistics Dept and I teach in the English Dept. I wanted to buy some art supplies so Masayo and I went to Musashi, the largest art supply store north of the Tokyo area. After that we, drove the short distance to our favorite pizza shop and had lunch. The shop is very small but the young master is an excellent cook and the meals are great. We had a salad, a pizza and desert for just over US$10. The master built the inside of the shop himself, including the over and a counter made from 55-gallon drums. The outside was apparently his work, too. This picture shows how little it looks like a pizza parlor.
After lunch, I went to Tohoku Gakuin University where I taught two classes. This picture shows the campus, all concrete. There are trees and grass around the outside but the main part of the campus is all concrete. I teach on the top floor of the second building on the right, just past the elevated walkway.

The following two pictures show the room in which I teach. Compared to Tohoku University, this is heaven - clean with lots of space to move around and observe the students. As you can see, there are individual seats for the student. Each one has a console with earphones, but I do not use this. I play a tape over the room's loudspeakers.

This week is one of only two weeks in which I have all of my scheduled classes. In all of the other weeks remaining in this school year (April to March), I have at least one day when the classes have been canceled or changed. In light of this I thought that I would show you the differences between the schools and the classrooms I use.

On Mondays I teach at Tohoku University, which is the national university and the most prestigious in the area. The students are academically the best. However, the school spends less on upkeep than any of the others. This is because of the way that the Ministry of Education budgets money, but that is another story.

This first picture shows the classroom to which I am assigned. I have two 90-minute classes during the first and second periods with a 10-minute break (8:50 to noon). For language teaching, or anything other than a straight lecture, the rooms are essentially useless. Because the desks are so close together, it is impossible to walk around the classroom observing the students and interacting with them. The teacher is forced to stay at the front of the room.

This picture shows the floor at the front of the room. The plastic tiles are falling apart and, although you can not see them, there are broken-off pieces scattered around. Also the wall needs painting. The really interesting thing is that they have just finished fixing up the buildings. I also should point out that there are almost no janitorial services. Oh, yes, the rooms are used for meetings by the student organizations in the evenings and the desks are covered with handouts every morning. If you look back at the first picture, you can see some of them, still on the desks after two classes.

This is the way the building looks from the outside. I teach in the right hand wing on the top floor. Most of the recent repairs went into the outsides of the buildings and on increasing the anti-earthquake protections, so the outside does not looks so bad. There are two other similar building and one new computer and LL building. The students have all of their first year classes in these buildings for the first two years, and then they move on to other campuses where they take up their majors.

This is a very bad system that pervades Japanese higher education - two years of basic studies and then two years of study of the major. For language teaching, it means that the students have English for two years and they they have two years in which to forget everything. Most studies show that the typical students leaves university at just about the same language level as they had when they entered. I must add there that Tohoku U. is changing, at least the language part, and beginning next year the students will have language in each year. Hopefully, it will improve things, but we will have to wait and see.