Ice Cream and English

I saw this snail dangling at the end of a branch one morning. I suspect someone put him there.

The rainy season has started here in Nara, Japan. So there's lots of humidity and lots of rain. Actually, there hasn't been so much rain so far. But yesterday it started to rain a little when I was out for a very long walk. I happened to run into a lot of students yesterday. On my way to the Twin Gate mall, I ran into a former student who graduated last year. I stopped and stared at her a moment to be sure I really did recognise this girl in an unfamiliar school uniform. Finally, I said, "Jellyfish?!" And she laughed. Near the end of her last year at junior high school, the students had had an assignment to write in English about what they wanted to be in the future. She wrote that she wanted to be a jellyfish, so that's what I've called her ever since.

She was also on her way to Twin Gate. I was going to see a movie that turned out not to be playing anymore. So I settled for getting ice cream instead at a fairly famous Okinawan place called Blue Seal. I've been there a few times now, it's pretty incredible ice cream. The history of the chain, according to Wikipedia:

The United States military created the ice cream for American soldiers stationed in Okinawa after the close of World War II, to boost morale and give them a familiar taste of home. Its first factory opened in 1948 on a US base. The Blue Seal products were only offered to Americans until 1963, when the company began selling to the Okinawan public. Their flagship store in Naha also opened that year.

Later on, the company transferred to local ownership and Okinawan flavors such as beni-imo (purple sweet potato) and Goya bitter melon were introduced.

Yesterday I had two scoops, Tropical Marble and San Francisco Mint Chocolate Chip". Maybe not the best combo but I wanted to try both flavours. They were all right but so far I'd most recommend Strawberry Cheesecake or Ube.

When I got onto the train on the way home, I suddenly found myself in the midst of the school volleyball team, on their way home from a game up north. I asked them if they won and they wouldn't tell me, which probably means they lost. The compulsive face saving in Japanese culture really is pervasive, it's like pulling teeth sometimes to get someone to own up to something negative. But they seemed to be in good spirits.

They were from the school I'd been working at since mid-April. On Friday, I was moved to another, smaller school where I'll be until the first week of October. Though really my time there will amount to about two months because my summer vacation begins in mid-July and ends at the end of August. It's been quite a shift, going from a school where I'm busy from when I arrive at 7:45am to when I go home at around 6:45pm. The school I'm at now, where I worked last year in the spring, is much more laid back and not quite as enthusiastic about help from a native English speaker. But the new first year students seem enthusiastic and eager to speak English. I often get the impression first year students are better English speakers than third year students, probably because of recent changes in the elementary schools.

Japan is ranked low among Asian countries in English proficiency. This article covers some of the reasons why pretty well, I think.

“I studied English in junior high school, high school, and university, and when I graduated college I didn’t speak English at all,” said Norihiko Inoue, the regional sales and marketing director at Education First Japan.

Fundamentally, I'd say the will just isn't there, however trendy Western things may be. It's so ingrained that I think some Japanese English teachers who really believe they're teaching English in good faith are really on more of a mission to throttle English to death. I've been in plenty of English classrooms where the teacher speaks Japanese 90% of the time to laboriously go over points of English grammar in a handful of sentences. There's lip service now paid to the idea that communication is the goal, not precise grammatical proficiency, but in practice, it's still usually all about mind-numbing drills and discussions of minor details. The Japanese word for "trivia" is mamechishiki, literally "bean knowledge", and I often think of it in English class. And in spite of all this emphasis on tiny details and grammatical perfection, I frequently encounter teachers making basic grammatical mistakes. The text books, crafted by a vast committee of esteemed Japanese professors, is full of grammatical errors.

Of course, if the will to learn English were really there, I wouldn't be seeing such prominent problems as this. But no-one really feels the urgency to change a system that's been in place for so long. Many students make no attempt to conceal their complete contempt and lack of interest in English. And honestly, I kind of respect them for it. They probably won't need English, ever, in their lives. There's no reason they should be raked over the coals of relentless, mechanical pedantry. There's no reason these poor kids should have to go home in tears to parents who will come down on them like thunderstorms because they got another 30% on an English test.

I remember one day in December last year, talking to a student who stayed late at school simply because she was afraid to go home and show her parents her test score. It really breaks my heart sometimes. Lately I've been watching a lot of music videos on YouTube and I actually, honestly teared up a bit watching Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall".