Adventures in Thailand

In the mean time, please enjoy these random pictures from Thailand:

Women playing Go, found in the first place we stayed.  Life felt Fated.

Waterwheel in a park.

Streets of Bangkok, loaded with motorcycles.

A room like this in Thailand will cost you $4.

A room like this will cost you $3. I like it more.

We ran into this Japanese family several times on our adventure.  When I returned to Japan, I actually ran into the father here one more time, playing in a band at a local festival.

Welcome to Cambodia.

Racism and Xenophobia in Japan

is something a lot of people outside of Japan love to believe exists in Japan, with out knowing the situation.  What people don't hear about, is that there are plenty of people that love foreigners, and interact with them regularly.  There are also plenty of people that don't normally interact with foreigners, but would be more than willing to, and enjoy the process, so long as they have the means to communicate. 
In my opinion, it greatly comes down to language.  I mentioned a few posts ago (bottom part of Pictures from around town) about how broken the English education system is here, and how it seems to instead be training Japanese folks how to be scared of foreigners.  Japan is however trying to move in positive directions.  As of yesterday's headline, English education will be taught to children from third grade elementary and onward, as required by the new educational law.  We'll see how this goes. 
As many folk in the English industry love to point out, when it becomes required by law, it means that the Japanese teachers are being put at the forefront of the matter.  That sentence in itself holds some racist connotations.  But one can only expect baby steps if real progress is to occur.  As it stands, Japan is 98% Japanese.  Increasing English language requirements also means increasing English speaking people, aka foreigners.  Those are my thoughts on the situation, at the moment.

Actually what really made me want to make this post today, is the principal at my Thursday school.  She had a very terrible relationship with the English teacher before me, because he did not speak Japanese and was not interested in helping the kindergartens.  I came into town and was the opposite personality, and what I found was that she is a person of no prejudice.  Work is work, and there will always be something to do for everyone, and she made sure I had a role in the kindergarten from the day I started working there, which is not an experience you often hear about here in Japan.  I had to work very hard at my other kindergartens to make anything like this happen.

I guess what I am saying is, one could say that there are X amount of problems in any situation, but it is never the whole story.  It's still a good thing to work on problems, but if we focus too much on them, I wonder if sometimes that's what leaves them to stay as problems. 

Potatoes, pototoes, and many more pototoes!

So it is Fall at last, and sweet potatoes are in season.  This week, every day at the kindergartens has involved some action or another with sweet potatoes.  So, if you haven't heard about sweet potatoes in Japan, now is the time!

Yesterday we cooked up about 100 of them, mashed them into moosh, added salt and sugar, and formed balls of "yaki imo,"  a traditional Japanese food.  It looks like this:

Very appealing picture I'm sure.  Actually it is quite tasty!

Then today, we had a mini fieldtrip to a nearby farm, where the kids got to pull their own sweet potatoes!  I did not take any pictures, so a stole two from the internet (Japanese websites www.yasainoiroha.com and www.project888.net which does not seem to exist)  This post is filled with pictures that are very appetizing!  From here on, enjoy two bug friends from Japan:

This is the legendary MUKADE 百足。A somewhat deathly poisonous Japanese centipede which often finds its' way into old houses here.  I've also seen them walking along roads, in the sandboxes that the kids play in at the kindergartens, and today we saw two of them mixed in with the sweet potatoes the kids were picking!

This one is a Yatoumushi 夜盗虫。Otherwise known as a cutworm.  They eat the leaves of the potatoes, and the people call them bad.  Aside from eating the leaves, I don't know what damage they do, but there were plenty of them today!

I love biodiversity.  I love animals, sea creatures, and yes bugs as well.  Actually bugs may be my favourite of the bunch, because they are generally so alien looking!  It's really cool to get such experiences as hanging out on little farms here!  And by the way, when I say little, I literally mean *little!*  A standard farm here is about 112 square meters!  

 Back to biodiversity, I think it's both  beautiful and a very important thing that kids these days are exposed to nature in its' rawest form.  I have met so many people in my life that look at a bug, and can think of nothing other than "ew" to say.  But without a strong and diversified bioverse, we cannot survive.  Not just the laws of our Earth nature, body nature as well -- there is not any one single food that we can all survive off of, because nothing gives us everything we need.

Hypothetically speaking, even if we were to develop something we could live off of, such as a pill form food, I don't think we as humans should take the stand to decide which creatures live and which die -- just because they do or don't survive a purpose to us.  (Except for mosquitoes! hah!) No religion speaking here, I just think if we try to control everything, life will be far less exciting. 

Pictures from around town

A picture down one of my favourite streets in all of Japan -- right in my neighborhood!

So, today I went on a field trip with one of my kindergartens to a local shrine!  A friend requested pictures, and I said I'd see what I could do.  Well the rules of Japan go that, privacy with children is a big deal, so getting pictures with kids is generally a big deal unless you have special permission for a special event.
Luckily, my friend just really wanted to see pictures of the shrine!
So, after work today, I did something I've been meaning to do for years now.  I went just bicycling around, taking pictures of things around town that make me happy to be alive / happy to live in this little town.  I did not take a ton of pictures, but I took a few of some little roads, temples, and shrines that I really love.  Unfortunately a photograph (at least one taken by myself) never seems quite as amazing as the real thing.  But anyway, I hope you enjoy these pictures with a few stories:

In the background of this picture, is the kindergarten I work at on Wednesdays,  I love being here.

This is a picture taken from the shrine/temple from the fieldtrip today. The shrine/temple is exactly that, and is pretty rare in Japan for it.  Normally a shrine and a temple are two separate places, but my town of Godo has a little bit of a special history, though I don't know all of it.  I can say that Tokugawa Ieyasu often came through this town, and his crest can be found all over town/the complex of this shrine-temple, and there is likely a connection to how it was decided to be both.
In the far background is the main entrance to the complex, which is a Torii-gate.  Torii gates are a Shinto thing, which means it is a Shrine thing.

This is where you rinse your hands when you go to a shrine or a temple!  Interesting fact:  If you go to Nara -- one of the ancient capitals of Japan, some of the tubs for the waters are actually recycled tombs from the past.

This is the pagoda of the complex.  It is obviously 3 levels high.  A pagoda is a Buddhist thing, so it is a part of the Temple aspect.  For clarification: Shrine = part of Shintoism (Japanese religion devoted to nature)  Temple = part of Buddhism (Asian religion that spread to Japan around 700 AD)

The three monkeys, speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil.

Part of the shrine.

Part of the temple.

A picture of the main street in town.  Every year there is a giant fire festival.  Men in loin clothes carrying burning hemp go running through this street.

Another little shrine around town.  One of my other kindergartens took a fieldtrip passing this one by today.

A beautiful little road in town.

Great herrings are incredibly common in the rice fields here.  I wonder if this is a relative?

A road I pass by on my way to work some days.

This is the essence of my little town^^ looking at this picture makes me feel so lucky to be alive!  I do believe that it is a profound respect for nature that makes life so beautiful in some ways.  Of course that's not everything.. but it's become a big one for me since moving here.

People make these little windmills all over town.

A little shrine I pass by every day.

Well, there is a little bit of where I live.  I've been here in Godo for about two and a half years now, and it feels like a second home in many ways.... in Japan for about five years now, unbelievable.

There are those that rant on about racism in Japan.  Though from my eyes, I think there is just an incredibly strong sense of historical patriotism from most.  What the government does, and what the people do, I think are two different things, and I will say that there are racist procedures from the government, but does acknowledging differences between foreigners and native born people make someone a racist?  I personally don't think it does, though that's not to say that racism doesn't exist at all.

As someone that has studied hard to learn Japanese, I believe that a lot of what foreigners consider racism is actually just language barrier, which in my opinion, is related to the failing English education system here in Japan.  Japanese people are forced to study English for 6 years of education, all through middle/high school.  In that class room, almost 90% of the time, there is a foreigner, but the foreigner's only role is often as just a tape recorder, and the focus of the lessons is not to communicate, but it is simply to understand --intensive grammar.

My opinion of this system is poor.  I believe that what Japanese people come out of the classroom with is a fear of language -- imagine you spend 6 years studying something, and don't feel like you can use anything from it?  I think they are learning that situations where you cannot communicate are awkward, and there is nothing more fearful to most Japanese people, than an awkward situation.  However, if you can prove yourself in language ability, then Japanese people will gladly openly talk with you -- although the opening conversation is often incredibly rehearsed. 

There's a lot more to account for than what I've said here, but I think I'll take this step by step for now!