Happy Easter, everyone. I don't have much time to enjoy it to-day because I'm busy moving to a new apartment. The community manager of my current apartment building is kindly helping me move by driving my books and furniture to the new place, which is an approximately three hour drive away. We travel west through Osaka and Kobe. Yesterday we saw a car the colour of a carrot.
I often speak to students here in Japan about western holidays with which they may not be familiar. I haven't talked to students about Easter in a long time. The holiday comes at the start of the school year here when I'm usually doing my self-introduction and the students are otherwise getting ready for the new semester.
Easter is a little odd. It seems almost as important as Christmas but there are few Easter songs and stories. I can only spend so much time talking about eggs and bunnies. Maybe I could take the opportunity to show students Elvis Costello's "Little Palaces", though I'd have to find a translation for it. And it would really be kind of an ironic Easter artefact, the song about oppressed workers in a Cadbury town who beat their children to take out their resentment. I think many teachers from the U.S. in Japan, whose job is partially to explain U.S. culture, too often fall into the trap of regurgitating the dark or trivial facts that were the focus of anti-colonial college rhetoric rather than explaining the basic reality of traditions. Still, one day I would like to show "Little Palaces" to a Japanese class. I just need to find the right pretext. There's a lot of class resentment in Japan, a song like this might be really appreciated if presented the right way.
No comments:
Post a Comment