Joshua's Corner and the Half Page Column

 Happy Tuesday from Akasaki

Our fish fly

     So there was something I wanted to talk about for a while now. I noticed on my blogger page there was an unpublished draft concerning something called "Joshua's Corner," which is the weekly article I write for my school's webpage. I think in my mind, I forgot that I hadn't published it, but I remembered that I wrote something about it, so it stayed there in digital purgatory for a while.

     Having lapsed all that time, I've become slightly disinterested in talking about why "Joshua's Corner" is a bit more challenging, but in classic bullet point fashion let me outline a few reasons:

• I can't write too much.
•  The picture I must submit to go with it needs to be 160x120 pixels in size - for perspective, a screen cap of an iPhone (first generation even) is bigger than this.
• I later found out it is translated via Google Translate.

     There's also the town article that I write as well. This one has similar limitations, but the audience is my entire town, so I try to write things that are universally appealing and less silly. I write it in English then I hand it over to one of my JTEs who translates it. I could probably take a fair whack at doing the latter myself but I'm happy to turn that over to someone else. Lately it's been a bit hard to find things to write about; being right in the middle of the school year offers little beyond quotidian observations. So for the latest entry I used exactly that and wrote an entry that was very personal and tried to flex the literary muscle a bit more than I have before. I'll probably stick to that method from now on seeing as my JTE enjoyed reading it, and I enjoyed writing it.

Here is the article from last month:

The Most of The Rest

May has arrived, seemingly out of thin air. Just the other day I was walking up the halls towards a class with another teacher and commented on how surprised I was that we have already entered the fifth month of the year. I barely noticed that spring had begun and it would appear that we are already about to leave it behind. In that moment I thought about how long I had been here, and that it would only be three more months before I will have officially been living in Japan for one whole year as an ALT. Sometimes it feels as though all my experiences up to this point have fused into a singular memory of “yesterday,” or some other time in the past. For as much as I try to combat that syndrome by keeping a daily journal I imagine that much of the everyday slips through the cracks. As I reached the 3^rd floor I realized that similar to how easily everyday life can pass us by, so too can the duration of my time in Japan, which is just as ephemeral. To that end, I was reminded of how important it was to make the most of my stay. By that time we were at the classroom, and we headed in.

     She said that it reminded her of a Chinese poem she once read about a man who went to sleep and had a dream that lasted his whole life. I filed it under "compliment" but let me know if you feel differently. 

On a completely unrelated note, there is a teacher here who stuffs his tie in his shirt pocket. All the time.

-J

Batabata (And Other Noises)

Today my elementary school visit was canceled.

     This year three of the elementary schools I visit: Yasuda (安田), Isai (以西), and Narumi (成美), have all converged into one location on Narumi's campus and rebranded themselves as Funanoe Elementary School (船上小学校). The change of course means so much news for all three of the schools. For one, they couldn't keep all that staff in one building. Even if the convergence meant they had three school's worth of kids there's certain positions that just don't overlap like the Principal, Vice-Principal, Nurse, and other such staff members. Also, the student population for each of the schools was very small. Yasuda, for example, had a 5th grade class of about 8 students and the around the same for the 6th grade class at Isai. What this means is that many of those classes could be combined, which consequently means that there would be even less positions available after the change. It's a big deal for everyone over there, and I'm not even sure who was able to stay or had to leave. I'll find out the next time I go to Funanoe. Naturally I have a couple of picks in mind if I were building the 2014 Funanoe Dream Team, but we'll see.
     Last week I received a temporary print out of this year's elementary school and kindergarten visits. Today was supposed to be my first visit to Funanoe but I hadn't received any fax or outline on what they wanted me to do. After Kyoutou-sensei asked about next week's kindergarten schedule I informed him that I hadn't heard about what I was doing for Funanoe; he shot straight up in his chair upon realizing this. He placed a phone call, then informed me that they were "batabata," an expression I'd heard before but never looked into. You could probably figure it out without me explaining it it all, but in short it meant they were busy.
     Onomatopoeic expressions do a lot of heavy lifting around here. One has to hand it to them for everything that they manage to say without saying much. Batabata (ばたばた）is not so much a word, but an expression indicated with the sound one makes by saying "batabata". It's a pretty hard concept to explain back home in America because there just really isn't a way of speaking like that. As with many things, there's similarities met with even more nuance. If you had to imagine it though, rather than saying someone was "shot" you instead said someone got "pew pew'd". That's a rough example but it's kind of the idea. Here's a better one for you. Let's pretend you performed a feat of illusion or some other manner of fantastic accomplishment, a fairly camp way of celebrating the climax might be, "tah-dah!". The word doesn't mean anything particular in that sense. It's just a sound to indicate something in our tangible word. Japan's ideophones (onomatopoeic sayings) on the other hand, cover far more abstraction. There's even a "sound" to indicate silence (しいん） which feels like dividing by zero to me. Some of the most well known ones include "doki-doki" (どきどき) -a heartbeat; "kira-kira" (きらきら) - the sound of sparkling; and Gyu (ぎゅ) - which means all kinds of things including: trembling, hugging, or squeezing.
     What makes all of this particularly interesting for me is the way in which language itself encourages these kinds of formations. I'm not a student of Chinese (language), but I remember way back in one of my college classes we discussed Chinese philosophy. One of the essays I wrote on the final for that class (several pages in fact) was how a white horse is not a horse, don't get me started on that by the way. In any case, one of the things we talked about in that class was how the construction of Chinese language allowed for this kind of jejune pedantry. They were playing games with language. In English, imagine I said "Dog Shark". What are you picturing? Chances are it's something that's either mostly one with hints of the other, that is to say: a dog-like shark or indeed a shark-like dog. For a pop culture reference of how this effect works in action check out the following character known as "Catbug" from the web-series "Bravest Warriors":

Part cat, part bug, 100% cute

     Catbug's form factor indicates he's mostly a bug, but the distinctive cat ears and mouth shape point towards that of a cat. He's a cat-like bug. It seems fairly cut and dry, but in our studies we discussed how Chinese language construction allows for something tricky. If written in Chinese the word "Cat-Bug" might not be interpreted as something cat-like or bug-like but as something that is at once a cat and a bug, or belongs to both groups of cat-ness and bug-ness. It's a bit more involved than this, but if you're interested check out the story here. It doesn't seem like a big difference, but it manifested into the form of an ostensibly intellectual school of Chinese thought, so there you go.
     Language is pretty fun and the sound effect based lingo that thrives here in Japan largely stems from the way their language is constructed as well. Japan has a syllabary rather than an alphabet. Since everything is composed of individual characters that represent a singular sound, it would seem that ideophones are far more represented in conversation than America. Manga is a particularly keen way to witness the uses of these effects, and has proven to be a place where they thrive due to their usefulness. In English we rely on words, descriptors, for actions or effects. Things like, "screech," "smash," "creak," and "knock-knock" are all words that become requisitioned to describe the action on the page. Japan has a veritable treasure chest of sound effects which are not exactly words in the sense that they exist to quite literally be the sound for what they describe whereas our onomatopoeia exists to describe what the sound is.

So long story short: they canceled my elementary school visit today.

Batabata,

J