Yes, okay, it’s been a while. I don’t have any brilliant excuses, just the usual ones. So why don’t we stop focusing on what I haven’t been doing, and start looking at what I have.
It’s the end of another week here in Kobe, and these last few weeks have been murderous. It’s not just the start of that all-important second wind in our own bodies, but the winds on the outside have changed as well, and the creeping cold is enough to keep many an ALT in bed. I myself have been a bit on the sick side lately (prematurely ending Halloween festivities), to the point that yesterday walking back from the station almost proved too great a challenge. As much as I would love to talk about the highly entertaining lack of stuff that’s been happening off the clock, pretty much everything worth talking about from an international understanding point of view was while I was at work.
Having left sports season behind, the nation now turns to sport’s reclusive twin brother, culture, for his moment in the limelight. Koryo was no exception to the seething mass of orchestral performances, amateur plays and artworks of all kinds that infested Japan in the last few weeks. I was drafted into helping set up and take down the displays, chairs and so on for the 23rd Culture Presentation (that’s a rough translation, that one) in exchange for alcohol. A lot of people make fools of themselves when drunk, but I think my inability to successfully quote “Even my father never hit me” in Japanese for the Gundam-loving PE teacher left quite a stain on my reputation more than any pratfalling would have done. But I’m getting ahead of things here, so let’s backtrack.
From 9am ‘til 12pm, the school flung open its gates for family of the students to come and inspect the cultural things they’ve paid money for their kids to do this term. Each classroom was vividly decked out with random pieces of artwork, poetry and the occasional textile or flower arrangement for visitors to come and see. There was some pretty impressive stuff to see, too; it’s a widely-held opinion that Japanese kids are genetically empowered in the drawing department, and Koryo’s Culture Presentation was further evidence. I didn’t get much of a chance to see many of the displays, assigning myself to the front gate to guide visitors around, as well as to show myself off as school property. Don’t get me wrong, I’d have gone inside and looked around a bit more if the other teachers on duty hadn’t seen me doing such a good job and left me alone to do it. I’m not complaining really, I got a chance to see a fair few of my elementary kids that morning, which was pretty cool.
At 12pm the stage is set for the, well, stage show portion of the day. Firstly we were shown each year group’s winners from the class choir competition earlier that week, followed by a joint venture from all members of the year at once. The first and second years were great, but I wasn’t so taken with the third years’ performance. I dunno, it just lacked something. It sounds to me like the same songs are chosen for every school in the city, so I bet the students are sick of hearing them by the time they’re finished. Would have been nice to get something I recognised, is all. After that was the presentation of a certificate to the girl who came up with the year’s school motto (“the seed of today, through effort, becomes the flower of tomorrow”, except in Japanese) and a talk by the health club on the importance of regular sleeping hours. Surely one of them must have mentioned that darkened room plus quiet music plus twenty minutes of talk about how great sleep is makes for an unresponsive audience… Then it was a quick break, presumably for the audience to get outside for some fresh air to wake themselves up. During the break I was told my tie was very cool. That was nice.
The second half of the show was dedicated to the third year leavers and the brass band. The former put on a short series of skits, joined together by an entertaining story about trying to make an idol group called KRY48. It had sounded really awful on paper, but they did an excellent job with it. The production managed to combine all three of Japanese entertainment’s biggest players: dance groups, comedy duos and truly weird stories. I didn’t really understand either of the last two, but my lack of native, regional Japanese only accounted for the comedy. The weird play was just downright weird. Anyway, that was pretty cool. The brass band, however, really were the neon-lit torpedo that blew the others out of the water. There were five songs played in total, notably including a Little Mermaid medley (I’ll bet you can feel the enthusiasm I had about that one), a Super Mario Bros. medley and the song ‘Laser beam’ by Perfume. It was a really excellent performance; I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t moved. It also made me want to play a wind instrument. After all that it was time to pack everything away and get roaring, screaming drunk. It was a good day, and I was happy to sacrifice my beloved Saturday for it. Tomorrow I’m going in to one of my elementary school’s Music Festival, this time as a guest (but I still get Monday off, weh-hey!), so be sure to look forward to a report on that.
I had a couple of weeks before the next big event, but it feels like I had a lot less. This week was my evaluation lesson, the one where they decide whether to keep me on or not. I know, I know, that may be a bit of an exaggeration. It’s in the Programme’s best interests to keep ALTs on for at least one year, so I’m sure they weren’t ‘out to get me’ in any way. But that does not stop me getting myself into a stress fest over it. In the end I had nothing to worry about. The class they were observing was a third year speaking test preparation class, and even though not one person volunteered answers (I did the same lesson with the three other third year classes that same day and got a much more enthusiastic response) there was some good practise throughout. The KEC representatives said they liked the rapport, the relationship with the teacher and the simplicity of the lesson, and also gave me some good ideas for improving on some of it for later use. No problem.
Next week is ‘Trial Week’ for the second years, the equivalent of work experience in the UK. The only difference is they are sent to shops in the neighbourhood rather than getting to pick their own from the city at large. The result of this, along with the mass of paperwork that needs doing while it’s going on, is that I have very little to do next week. I’m looking forward to that.
Oh, that reminds me. One of the other Kobe ALTs has started a project with his third years to start writing letters to other ALTs in the city, and I’m helping out (along with quite a lot of us). On Wednesday I received six letters from third years, and I spent a fair amount of the day replying to them. Most of them had already heard that I liked Pokemon, so many were asking me about that. Some asked about sports, some about music. One guy (who had the nerve to start his letter with “Dear Pepe Swan”) asked about pretty much everything under the sun. I also received more pictures of Pikachu than I know what to do with.
Week after next is the first JET Skills Conference, and all. It’s a busy month, this one. I think one of the big things that makes it an event to remember is that every ALT will be attending along with a selected Japanese teacher of English from their school. I get the feeling it’ll be a little like show and tell for us ALTs. Not really sure what else to expect, except maybe more sitting and listening ala Job Training all those weeks ago.
So yeah, all in all things are going well. I continue to talk to more of the students, and they in turn get more comfortable with trying to talk to me. I met a few of them on the tube with Steph the other day; they made quite a fuss about that the next day in class. My lesson-making experience continues to build, and usually they go off without a hitch. The less said about that Halloween monster making class, though, the better… More excrement-themed abominations than you could wave a stick at. Today I did comparative adjectives with the second years, which went down a real treat. I’m honestly exhausted all the time these days, and slouching at my desk plus low blooming ceilings at home have made for some nasty neck pains, but things are going really well. The only problem I’m having, something that was brought up a little at church on Sunday, is that I appear to have become a slave to my own sense of time. In a day I have about four hours of free time. In that time I have to cook dinner for tonight and lunch for tomorrow. No problem, right? But every night it feels like I’ve been robbed of what could have been a satisfying amount of free time. I go to bed (at nine thirty, the sad old man that I am) feeling dissatisfied with my relaxation, and each day I long for Christmas more and more. It’s making me grumpy, which I don’t like. If there’s one thing I’m trying to avoid being, it’s grumpy. For now I’m trying to value the time that I get for what it is, not what it could have been. Right?
So that’s international understanding and angsty soul-searching out the way. Let’s talk about what I want to really talk about.
It’s been a corker of a week for video games. As an attempt to celebrate for a hard October I decided to splash out on a game this weekend, and happened across a game from a series I’d been hoping to get into for a while now: Silent Hill 4 on the PS2. PS2 games are still in vast supply (and production, you may be surprised to hear) here in Japan, but still manage to come off as quite cheap, and SH4 only set me back about 8 pounds (this keyboard I’m using doesn’t have the pound symbol, I’m afraid). I’d heard that it’s not the best in the series, being too combat-y for a proper tense survival horror, but it was the only one I could find and thought, hey, if I play all the others afterwards they’ll probably look even better! I have to say, it’s not all that scary. As soon as I got my hands on that aluminium bat and started charging up attacks to the full all fear of green dogs with tongues, two-baby-faced hand monsters and some kind of chest/face monkey thing went out the window. Even those nurse things weren’t all that bad. The ghosts are a bit alarming, but that’s it, nothing a bit of speed can’t handle...
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That’s what I thought until last night, at any rate. I’m not going to spoil a thing, but let’s just say events have transpired that make the eponymous room, which had become my lovely little salvation-hole when the dank subways, spooky forests and water treatment plants turned child murder camps got a little too much, into something I want to avoid. It’s very clever, really, how it hands you an unsettling situation and then says ‘Don’t worry about it! You’ve got a completely safe apartment to go home to! Look, it even restores health for you!’, but then snatches that completely safe apartment out of your hands while you weren’t looking and replaces it with a ticking ecto-plasmic timebomb. Now I can’t even save the game without risking a heart attack (for me or Henry) and with added responsibilities stacking up (SH veterans may know what I’m talking about) suddenly the game becomes something of a gruelling exercise, like holding your breath underwater, rather than a fun romp through slightly-surreal land. I’m of two minds as to whether I’ll take a deep breath and plunge back into that nightmare tonight. I may just reserve myself to the other game I bought this weekend.
Which is a real gem, let me tell you. It’s barely been out a week, and Final Fantasy Type-0 is simply staggering. It’s not ‘real’ FF by any stretch, being a third-person action game with multiplayer inklings (like, I learned last month, a third of all Japanese games these days), but it’s really, really awesome. Just like running away from an invincible robot spider, putting on a play to kidnap a princess or watching your entire world blow up in a big, watery explosion, it’s the very beginning that really grabs your attention. I really like the return to FF8’s Battle Royale-style combat Japanese high school setting, and in T0 they’ve combined that with the world politics of Avatar: The Last Airbender to make something not too deep, but very compelling. In terms of story, I’m a little disappointed that there’s so many characters on offer from the very beginning. All of the protagonists (all 14 of them) have their own individual personalities and quirks, and all have been carefully crafted like a collection of rare figurines. But like a collection of rare figurines crammed into a display case too small for them, you don’t really see a whole lot any one of them, and it feels too much like Class Zero is a character on its own rather than there being a complete, well-constructed set of protagonists. Perhaps the game will prove me wrong later in the game, but I doubt it.
I like King. King is really cool. He’s a bit if a Yakuza punk, not something I really like normally, but you can’t say no to double pistols as a weapon choice. And that’s where the game really does excel. The 14 characters may all be crafted from the same clay personality-wise, but in terms of combat each one could not be more different. It’s a real shock to the system to switch characters half-way through a mission, as you have to pick up a whole new set of tactics and ways of playing. It feels amazing, like being in a sandbox-style shooting game and instantly being given all the weapons. There’s choice like you wouldn’t believe. In between the awesome missions you get time off to do what you like. You can go chat to some other students, fight some guys in an arena or head out into the world and do any number of other things. Oh, yeah, I forgot. Sometimes you have to go all real-time strategy and command troops between your cities to attack other cities. It’s a little farfetched – why leave commanding the armies of the nation to a bunch of 17 year olds when said nation surely must have military commanders to do that for them? I’ve only done one of these Risk-y missions so far, but it seems to be balanced okay. It’s just not quite like a proper mission, as far as I’m concerned.
So yeah, that’s my life up ‘til now. There’s not a whole lot else worth saying. I’m watching the new series of the Walking Dead, which is great. I got a little zombie game on my iPhone for free, that’s also great. Did I mention someone complemented my tie?
Thanks for reading.
