All The Cards Are On The Table

This week I have woken up at the crack of dawn every morning to allow me plenty of time to tour around Nara and each morning I have been met with less than desirable weather. Today I slept in. It was 11AM when I finally yawned and stretched my way into existence to find the bluest of blue days outside my window. The weather had played a cruel prank on me and I had slept away a perfectly good morning. There was not much time left to spare and wanting to take advantage of some of the gorgeous day I quickly dressed and caught my train into Nara with the self promise to always rise early to check the skies. Should I be met with a good day I will head on out and explore and if the skies are cloudy and gray then I will just go back to bed. I will try to not sleep away a morning like this again.



I only had two hours before I had to be in the classroom so I only managed to make it to Todaiji Temple once again to get a shot off of the gate I had mentioned but did not show on my entry about my temple visit. The sky that day did not present this enormous structure in a good enough photographic light. Today the Nandaimon gate looked spectacular against the blue backdrop.




I have realized that I am an obsessive compulsive photographer. I literally take the same shot about thirty times with slight variations in angle and framing. I always have to allot extra time at some tourist site for my obsessive photographic nature. I am just never satisified with the result and this is sort of true for pretty much everything I do. I always think I can do better. My ideology is more is more and in the case of photography this is a good thing because the more you fire off the better your chances at obtaining a usable image. A lot of my time is spent analyzing my photos and I will spend excruciating minutes agonizing over two or three separate shots where the only difference is an inch of space in framing between them.

Take the original shots of Todaiji for example. I think they are really good and actually better then the travel guides and postcards I have seen but here I was here again today firing away two dozen shots of something I was satisfied with. Here you find the fruits of my obsession. Some shots of the exact same path to the exact same temple only today the sky is a touch more blue and my angle is more to the left then the right with a tighter crop. Most folks won’t notice these little deviations in image unless they were pointed out but to me they just irk me. Are these photos better then the shots on the first day? The sky is nicer in the shots where the temple is in the distance however the close up shots of the temple were better on day one. However, returning does allow me to try some things I hadn’t done originally and a shot of the entranceway to the temple, long and red, with Todaiji above was a new angle I had overlooked. Oh, this obession is both a curse and a blessing because now I was running short on time but what was that shimmering gold thing over there?




With time ticking away I quickly walked around the temple and found a few things I had not seen on my previous visit like a tall golden statue that resembled a pagoda (although I am not sure what it was and why it was there) and a small red shrine on an island in the middle of the pond on the temple site. A couple cuddled on one of the benches overlooking the shrine as a deer try to nibble at whatever was hiding in the woman’s pockets.


I could not linger and with the knowledge that I would be back here many times I turned and headed back into town but not before finding an interesting photo op of some old twisting tree roots…


…and the Nara museum.

730pm marked my final lesson of the week but this lesson held more significance to me then it simply being the last hour of work before a day off. This school is the last school of my scheduled rotation of four schools a month and with this last lesson all the cards have been dealt. I now have taught all of my main classes, know my good ones, my bad ones, my demon kids and my angels. Of course, all of this is subject to change but right now I have been to all my schools, survived the first month of lessons on my own and have a pretty good idea what I am up against. I am pretty secure on navigating my way to the classes and am much more at ease now that the cards have been overturned. I’ve made it this far into the hand and am not planing on folding so let’s toss a few chips into the pot and fill you in brief about my four main classrooms.

Notice how I say classrooms. I have erroneously called these places “school” before and you’d be greatly mistaken to think that where I teach is at a school. Unlike I school, my educational site has only one room. There are no lockers or other instructors or janitors or principal to send children who misbehave to. There is just a single room. The Company will rent these rooms out from just about anywhere. Classes can be found in apartment buildings, above auto body shops, in office buildings and the one thing you can guarantee about the placement of your classroom is that it will be out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. All classrooms pretty much look the same and are stocked with the same material. Seriously, right down to exactly the same scissors, pens and masking tape. Each room is a twin of the others, although not identical. There are some slight variations. Some rooms will have neatly organized folders for your flashcards while others will have them in boxes. All depends upon how anal your Japanese Teacher is about neatness. Some classes will have world maps and others will not. Some FAX machines are newer and some look like they belong in the 60s. However, the rooms do not tend to deviate much from mandate and it sometimes feels that you haven’t budged from one week to the next as it is as though you are still sitting in the same spot.

As mentioned I have four main classrooms. I can be sent to a whole whack of other ones on office days but my weeks will mainly consist of teaching at these four mains. Consider them both the foundation of your job and four rooms of a house that you just keep building upon. Here are my mains in order of work week:

WEEK ONE: KASHIHARA KOKUBU
TRAINS: 1
TRAVEL TIME: 45 minutes
This is the least spectacular of my classroom areas. It does not have the sites and scenery as my other four but is the easiest to find as it is located pretty much next to the train station. In the vaccinate of the train station you can find a small McDonalds (doesn’t have the same menu of the larger ones) and a Subway restaurant. I have only seen one Subway since I have been here. You smell the sandwiches as you walk on by and like the Starbucks in Nara it reminds me of home. There are some subs unique to Japan just as there are some McDonald’s burgers you are can only get here (though I’m not touching that egg burger looking thing). I would snag a sub for lunch in a heartbeat but next to the Subway is a cheap Japanese/Chinese restaurant mix that serves huge bowls of delicious soups for under five dollars. I took all my lunches at this place the week I was here and capped off my meal with a visit to the bakery/café near the station entrance. Here you can purchase these scrumptious banana pastries dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with little caramel clusters. Tasty! Oh yes, this is where I first met the Bubble Man living in the vending machine under my classroom. I have not really explored this area much but there doesn’t appear to be anything photo worthy about so I have kept the camera at home. This was one of two classes where I was able to leach wireless Internet service from somebody in the area and remain in contact while waiting for my home hook up. The class is in an office building and is located on the second floor. The kids here were all great and the only concern with this classroom is with the parents come pick-up time. There is a grocery store/shopping mall across the busy street in front of the class and some of the parents park there and don’t bother to come across the street to get their kids. The kids dart out into the road and to their folks who are either really lazy or idiots blind to the dangers of all this. The older kids are smart enough to know to cross when the light changes but some kids just run out. I have reminded myself to make mention of this to the Japanese Teacher in hopes of maybe getting the parents to at least wait by the doorway downstairs.

WEEK TWO: TAKADA KATASHIO
TRAINS: 2
TRAVEL TIME: 25 minutes
This is the closest school to me. The former teacher said you could walk it but it would take about two hours or so. It is located a few stops away from the Kashihara Shrine which allows for mornings exploring that area and then catching the train into work. This is my easiest week with only three teaching days and one of those days is a single class. This is the class located in the city with that red shrine and steel flower statue. You walk through an arcade path to get to the school and there is an ice cream stand on the way that sells green tea ice cream. A grocery store a block away from class was a great find as it has the cheapest groceries of any place yet. The set up is a little strange with piles of stuff and only a few shelves but the price is right and I will be doing my shopping there for certain products. Kids are two opposite ends of the spectrum: they are either really hyper or really morose. The older classes just don’t want to be there it seems while the younger kids have to be pealed off the walls. The thing is, the younger kids here grasp things that the older kids should know but don’t. The biggest problem with this school is that it is located on top of a clinic. Who the hell rents out a children’s classroom above a medical center? From reading the notes in the communication book I found that the doctors will come up and complain if your lessons get too noisy so he challenge here is trying to keep the kids from jumping up and down with less active gaming. Ah, right up my ally. I had to file my first incident report at this school because a group of boys loudly knocked on my door and one of them tossed a bookbag in and ran away. I had no idea who this kid was. Was he dropping off a bag for a student? Did he belong in the class I was currently teaching? Turns out the kid was from the next class and had arrived 45 minutes early with a group of school friends who proceeded to run all around the building using it as a playground. I kept thinking of the clinic downstairs and had to go out to keep shouting at them to not play here. Half of my lessons was spent on the phone figuring out this whole mess. This is also another place where the parents park across the street when there is a perfectly good parking lot downstairs. I did make a note of this one as it is much more frequent then the Kokubu school.




WEEK THREE: NARAMACHI
TRAINS: 2
TRAVEL TIME: 60 minutes
My farthest trip but to the best city and best classroom of students. My jaunts around Nara and my adoration for the city have been well documented this last week so I won’t go into the detail of why I love the location so much because the amount of writing and photographs on the subject should make that obvious. This class is located next to a cemetery which is a little creepy as it is the first thing you see when you walk out the door. It is on the third floor of an apartment building that sits about two restaurants that only open later in the evening. One of them serves okonomiyaki. Okonomi means “what you like” and yaki means “cooked”. You might recall me writing of a that pancake like thing I ate that was cooked on that hot grill right on the table. Well, that was Okonomiyaki. In this region it is pan-friend made from flour, grated yam and either octopus, squid or shrimp (though you can get it with pork). I have not entered the place yet but the smell is always overwhelmingly tempting. The teacher at this school has to be a trained drill sergeant because, for the most part, these kids are the most disciplined bunch of children I have ever met. They are just machines or repetition and really know their stuff with their English levels surpassing where they should be at in some instances. I picture the JT as R. Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket just barking out orders to these “troops”. The bulk of these classes are ones I will look forward to. Two of them, however, I will not. They are both the older lot and one of them is a group of zombie girls who hardly move and speak in whispers. Getting them to do anything is a chore. The other has three boys who love to beat the living hell out of each other and two girls who you can tell hate the ground they are sitting one. These will be tough eggs to crack but otherwise Nara is the crown jewel in the collection of my classrooms.

WEEK FOUR: TENRI
TRAINS: 2
TRAVEL TIME: 35 minutes
Oh Tenri, home of my two ADHD kids and Son of Lucifer! Tenri, the class with the bathroom outside and a door that opens practically onto the street. Tenri is the classroom I will dislike the most but mainly for that day where I run the Eliminator. I have strong hopes that the kids here will get easier as they get used to me but my patience is stretched to the limit here. This is also the classroom with the least amount of organization as it takes a good deal of time to find things to prepare for my lessons as there are boxes and cards and books scattered about with no rhyme or reason. Of course, Tenri has that beautiful church by the mountains, some notable shrines, a waterfall and is the starting point to walking the longest road in Japan so the city does not lack for sights of exploration. The class is my longest walk from the station and it takes me to the edge of race paddies and farming homes. Tenri has this huge train station (just behind Nara’s in the size of my main stops) and outside there has always been two or three young guys playing guitar and singing Japanese punk rock tunes. I look forward to visiting the town each month and for the most part the classes are no all bad but one school had to be the most dreaded and because of the Eliminator Tenri grabs that spot.

And there you have it. I am now once month in and the circle starts anew.