opinios

There are a couple of livewires in my first year class at junior high school this year. Two boys in particular are uber-genki. It's not that they're bad students - they always do pair-work activities and pick things up quickly. In fact, they're great.

They're just LOUD.

It's hilarious - when we are drilling new language, they pipe up in silly deep voices and make a laugh out of it all. Some would say they are taking the piss, but they are not distracting others, but actually making the lesson more fun. I think they just love being attention-getting clowns. And it makes everyone laugh and the whole lesson a bit more enjoyable (let's face it, how exciting can listen and repeat get?)

Anyway, today after class as I was walking down the staircase on my way back to the teachers' room, I heard a loud bellow of "MASHUUUU!!!!" and looked up. My two favourite little loud boys were at the top of the stairs, screaming enthusiastically at the top of their voices.

Mashuuuu!! Nan iro? What colour? What colour?

The boys had their legs spaced widely apart and were grinning as they eagerly pointed to their groins.

Ahh yes, thus our young curious scouts stumble upon the age-old and oft-speculated question that must plague Asian kids daily, from Timor to Thailand:

What colour is the pubic hair on a foreigner who doesn't have black hair?????

And thus one of the mysteries finally gets solved. Boys, it's flourescent pink. And yes, it glows in the dark.

I mean, honestly.

Today I taught a couple of classes at an elementary school in Katsushika, and in one of the classes was a boy who couldn't sit still.

I mean, he was hyperactive or something. A kid whose mind worked slowly in terms of traditional learning, but whose body wouldn't sit still. He had a full-time teacher by his side to try and keep him and calm and help him focus his attention on what I was saying. But all he did was squirm and writhe and try and run on the spot while the special-ed teacher tried (with moderate success) to pin him down.

I don't know how she did it.

My job was easy. I only had to play games with the other 32 kids, teach them some simple English expressions, show them how to make the letters of the alphabet using their body, and generally goof off and have fun. "Normal" kids that age are easy to keep entertained. If there is some game going on, everyone wants to be part of it. In particular if there is some element of competition between teams, then you pretty much have the whole class in the palm of your hand and hanging on your every word.

But her job was to control this little boy who refused to be controlled. At one stage I heard her let out a muffled yelp as his flailing arms whacked her when he tried to break free and run into the centre of the room and disrupt the class in the middle of a game of "Duck, Duck, Goose". I really felt for her.

But it barely showed on her face. The entire 45 minute lesson she was beaming a huge smile which rubbed off on everyone, and when her hands were free she would join in the clapping of hands and try her darndest to get her young companion to do the same. She was amazing.

My hat goes off to all the special education teachers out there who spend their full time job giving extra attention to those kids who need it. I sure as hell couldn't do it. I don't know how you do what you do every day, but the rest of us (especially the parents of slow learners, I am sure) are certainly grateful for the job you do.

Jeremy has sent through a "best of" collection of photos from his time in Mount Buller this winter, and there are some beauties. We haven't seen too much in terms of fast action from Jeremy's camera in the past, but these skiiers and boarders show us how the backside-air-reverse-flip showtime is delivered, Oz style, and Jeremy captures it all magnificently.

Incidentally, Jeremy is exhibiting some of his work at Photophilia, an exhibition "for lovers of photography" that showcases the works of some of Melbourne's most promising artists in both colour and black and white photography. The exhibition is on at:

Collingwood Gallery
292 Smith Street
Collingwood, Victoria
November 21 - December 4, 2003

The gallery is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 7pm, so if you live in Melbourne, go and have a look!

There's a reason I have been quiet for a while. My employer had me revamp their web page, and while I worked on it for most of the summer, the approval process in Japan can take a while and as a result the release date was somewhat delayed. So when they told me last Thursday that it was time to go live, things were a bit out of date and I had to bust my gut over the weekend to get things ready to go.

Anyway, after a few dramas and plenty of late nights, I turned the big switch on Sunday morning and they seem to be pretty happy with the result. While the perfectionist in me is not completely happy with it (I have learned so much about the benefits of CSS and table-less HTML in the past couple of months!) functionally it does what they ask and I take solace in knowing this:

It looks a hell of a lot better than it used to.

Anyway, I have had a few excellent submissions come in and will be posting them very soon, so stay tuned to this space!

I am indeed a sucker for punishment.

I had the misfortune of going along to see some rakugo this afternoon. Rakugo is the Japanese equivalent to stand-up comedy, but obviously the style is quite different. In the West most stand-up involves at least some element of being rude. Eddie Murphy, Billy Connolly, Rodney Rude, Steady Eddy. Even Jerry Seinfeld's snippets had the occasional snippet of innuendo. The goal is to have the audience in fits for the majority of the time they are sitting in down.

It seems the goals in rakugo are a little different. I'm not quite sure what they are, but if you can imagine going along to a family reunion and hearing your great grandpa Ralph relay stories from "when I was a lad", from dinner until the early hours of the morning, then you would be getting close. From what I had read, the stories are generally set in the Edo period, and involve the performer assuming different roles and basically acting as the medium for these different characters to have conversations to facilitate the story. The smells, sounds and images of Edo-Tokyo are supposed to come washing back from the past.

I had three reasons for attending this side-splitting (ahem) performance. One was because one of the performers was a guy who works at my school. No, not as a teacher - Yoshizawa-san works in the office. I don't have much to do with him except at the end of the month when he approaches me for money for the school lunches I eat there every day. But he's a nice guy and had mentioned that he was performing, so I said I'd come along.

The second reason was, of course, to tick it off the list. Seeing some live rakugo is one of those cultural things that, like Sumo, Noh and Kabuki, one feels obliged to experience at least once while living in Japan.

And thirdly, it was free. Say no more.

Nick Pal had expressed an interest in joining me, but was running a little late. I was looking forward to it though (it couldn't run longer than an hour or so, surely) and so I settled into my seat at the Fukugawa-Edo Community Centre. I suddenly realised that not only was I the only foreigner (as expected), but I was also the youngest person in the audience. By about 40 years.

I desperately sent Nick a text message on the phone, requesting that he bring beer.

The first storyteller began his ramble, and although I actually understood more of the Japanese than I had at my school culture day, I still couldn't put it together. The audience chuckled here and there. His facial expressions and staccato arguments that he had with himself were comical enough to draw a smile from me, but basically most of the dialogue went over my head.

Fifty minutes later I realised that I could be in trouble. My Japanese listening muscles were prepared to sit through an hour, maybe an hour and a half of Edo period rough slang, but it looked like there were going to be four performers, and if each was going to run for that long, well... you do the math.

Nick arrived half an hour in and we both sat patiently, straining our ears and trying our darndest to comprehend what was going on. It was futile though.

As soon as the first performer finished, we cracked our tall cans of beer open and began to chug-a-lug. I think it was the fastest I have drunk 500mL of anything. Once both cans were downed we gave a silent nod to each other and hastily made our exit.

Here was my dilemma though - I had seen Yoshizawa-san on the way in to the hall, and said hello, so he knew I was present. I had to watch his performance, but who knew how long away it was. We asked the lovely ladies at the front desk. They empathised with our situation (Muzukashii, desho? - I guess it's difficult hey?) and informed us that at 3.30, Yoshizawa-san, the star performer of the day, would be taking to the stage for our laughing enjoyment.

Nick and I took our time, dined on some sashimi at a local hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and sobered up. Half a litre of beer with no lunch really goes straight to the head. It was good though, we hadn't caught up for a while and had a good chat before preparing for the final show.

We snuck in at around 3.30 and eagerly awaited Yoshizawa-san's humorous antics. He took his place on the sacred cushion on stage and began rambling. And rambling. And on he went. I picked up bits and pieces but even what I could understand wasn't funny. It just wasn't. No-one in the audience was laughing either. I panned around.

They were all asleep.

Well, not all of them. But definitely a majority. I even heard a snore coming from the back row. This was supposed to be comedy! And I had yet to hear a single laugh. Poor Yoshizawa-san, I really wanted to support him. But I just couldn't take it any more.

I sculled the rest of my Yebisu beer, turned to Nick, and got a nod of agreement from him.

And we got the hell out of there.

I've been browsing the web a bit lately, looking for different resources available to improve my knowledge of web design, standards and illustration packages. And I came across sessions.edu, an online school offering all sorts of design and multimedia courses for varying degrees of cash.

I was just getting my head around the different combination courses and curriculum of each of them, when all of a sudden up popped a chat-box, out of the blue:

Hello there, how are you this evening?

I was quite taken aback. I didn't respond. This was all a bit The Matrix.

My name is Shiraz, can I answer any questions about any of our courses?

I hesitantly wrote back and thus initiated a conversation with the sales rep who was on hand to "make finding course information more interactive". He professed to being a current student of sessions.edu, but it was obvious that he had had some serious sales training. He was smooth.

Sessions.edu uses Groopz, a Java application that allows vendors to:

...proactively contact and initiate dialogue with the prospects on your web site. Only Groopz allows you to actually SEE ALL OF THE VISITORS on your web site RIGHT NOW, and SELL THEM, RIGHT NOW".

I don't know, but I always thought the reason a web browser was called a browser, was because it allowed you to do just that - browse. Is the luxury we have enjoyed until now of being able to peruse and gather information uninterrupted (thanks to pop-up blockers like the one built in to Mozilla Firebird, or the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer) under threat? Is Google going to have to extend their pop-up blocker to include a "chat box blocker" to stop pesky sales people from confronting you with inane sales pitches while you are in the middle of reading a web site?

And what kind of a stoopid name is Groopz, anyway? It sounds like a 1980s boy band...

So I have basically decided that I want to get into web design seriously when I go back to Australia, but I can't believe the can of worms that a bit of research opens up. It's not enough these days to have an eye for aesthetics and some HTML skills. These days design studios require applicants to be familiar with expertly proficient in a ridiculous array of difficult-to-learn software. Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, InDesign, Flash, Fireworks, not to mention actual technologies like Perl, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, Java, SQL, Apache, Flash ActionScript... the list goes on. Most of them are easy enough to do simple stuff in, but when you try and do something that might look, gasp, semi-professional. Well...

Luckily there are countless online tutorials to work my way through. Am even considering paying money for a course when we leave Japan next year.

Maybe one of these days I can give old opinios another overhaul to make it use CSS properly (folks, this stands for Cascading Style Sheets and refers to a way of coding HTML pages to separate the content from the way it is presented).

In the mean time, my buddy Ben has also turned his had to web authoring and helped his uncle get his collection of (impressive) oil paintings online. www.donrankin-art.com.

I attended the first half of my junior high school's anniversary festival today. I get the impression that one doesn't normally get invited to these kinds of things (I didn't last year), but I have established a good rapport with the teachers at this school and felt like I should do the right thing and make an appearance.

I rocked up (9.00 on a Saturday morning, mind you) not quite knowing what to expect, and took my seat in the gymnasium in the area reserved for teachers, off to the side of all the students.

And thus the music begun.

It must be that Japan is a karaoke-culture that so many kids have no inhibitions about just getting up on stage and belting out a number. Ikeda-kun from the 3rd grade did it while playing a guitar and harmonica, and he sounded good. The girls from 3B didn't quite hit the high notes of their soppy number, but credit to them for having a go (they still sounded better than I would have had I tried to sign in front of a few hundred people). I really enjoyed listening to the different styles that were performed, from pop rock to love ballads to brass-band instrumentals.

But the problem for me was that after the music finished, the rest of the day was full of plays. Music is a universal language. Japanese is not.

Before I continue, let me clarify that I tried really hard to understand what was going on. I had drunk a Dekavita C genki drink with my breakfast to pep me up in preparation for a long day. And for quite a while now I have felt confident enough to carry out a conversation in Japanese with anyone about pretty much anything. If you don't know the word for something, you can always say it another way and be understood.

But hearing native speakers speak amongst themselves and understanding what is going on is an entirely different ball game. I have definitely made ground lately in terms of comprehending the Japanese I hear around me, and I'm sure if I watched more television understanding would improve. Unfortunately I'm just not much of a television watcher.

And so it was useless. The speed these kids rattled off their lines, using all kinds of variations and rough phrases for when people get angry or are frustrated made comprehension impossible. The play lasted about 45 minutes and I understood about 10% of it. I was proud to see my students up there, so naturally acting out some drama about... well I actually have no idea what it was about... but I was still proud to see them up there on stage and in lights. But that's not enough to get you through 45 minutes while sitting in an uncomfortable chair. The audience laughed at punchlines, gasped at shocking turns of events, and cheered at heartfelt speeches. And I clapped politely.

All of a sudden I felt incredibly lonely. Here I was, sitting on my own in a big hall surrounded by a constant stream of a foreign language coming at me, with no reprise. I've been in this country for over 2 years and really made an effort at studying the language and immersing myself in as much of the culture as I can, and I basically understood nothing. It was a frightening realization.

The festival runs all day. The afternoon is full of plays, and as much as I wanted to "do the right thing" and stick around, I had to excuse myself. I used the word yakusoku, which means that I had a promise that I had to keep.

Not a complete lie - the promise was with myself, and involved having some solo time, before I have to go into Japanese mode again for the dinner with all the teachers from 6.00 tonight. At 6,000 yen a head, it better be a damn fine meal.

Never since arriving in Tokyo have I wanted to be surrounded by English so much. Not a good frame of mind to be in for studying for my exam. Hence the question: is it better to be completely ignorant and not speak any nihongo, so that you don't get invited to all these things and don't have to struggle through the frustrations of understanding nothing? Probably not, but it would certainly be a hell of a lot easier...