Joseph Sims.com

When I asked the following question to several different Japanese people on different occasions, I always received the same answer.

Question: What do you do if you get hungry after dinner?

100% of Japanese polled answered: I go to bed early.

The margin of error for this poll is pretty high since I only asked about 5 people.

Happy New Year! It’s already 2008! Does anybody know what that means? I’ve been in Japan for about 5 and a half months! Yikes. Time flies when you’re having TV and beer, I guess. Anyways, with the New Year, it is time once again for New Year’s resolutions. My resolutions this year mostly boil down to habits that I’d like to form.

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Hello and welcome to another installment of Joe’s webjournal. I haven’t made one in a while, and I can only blame YOU for not bugging me about it ;-). Japan is great, but I have been sick and moody lately. It seems like I can’t catch up on my sleep, probably because I don’t set a very reasonable sleep schedule. I think this kind of thing happens when your job starts at noon every day.

I saw the first real snow this week. It was pretty, but it didn’t fall heavily. Right now, it is cold enough for snow to pile up, but there needs to be more of it falling if I want to see a white christmas.

Anyways, I promised to keep you updated, and so I shall enthrall you with more tales of amazing Japanese stories. I’ve taught several recent classes on creating a compare-contrast essay, so I’m probably an expert at that. So, what should I contrast.. let’s see… how about karaoke?

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I know that you’re all fat and happy after your Thanksgiving meals right now, and I’ll admit that I missed out. Last night (it’s already Friday here), I ate a nice big bowl of ramen from a local ramen shop. Let me tell you that it was delicious, and it really reminded me of Thanksgiving considering that ramen isn’t very good for you, either.

In Japan, today (Friday) is a national holiday, so I managed to sleep in and take it pretty easy so far. I also took Saturday off this week, and I might take a trip into Tokyo or something.

It’s getting pretty cold right now. I heard that yesterday it snowed a little bit somewhere in Ina. It sounds like it will only get colder. Yay.

On Monday, I went bowling. The closest bowling alley to Ina is in Minowa, which is kinda the next town over. It is too far to walk. One solution is to take the train, but the alley is still something like two kilometers from the closest train station.

Anyways, my friend Mikio drove Laura and me there, and I bowled pretty well. We played three games, and I rolled 138, 179, and 107. The last score is due to a progressively opening sore on my thumb that made me try to bowl differently.

I used a 14 pound ball (yeah, they list bowling ball weights in pounds here), and the ball looked like it had rarely been used. It’s just too big for average Japanese people. The ball was so seldom used that the finger holes were still rough (instead of worn smooth). So, they tore up the skin on my thumb a bit (I tried two different balls, and that’s why I have two different sores), but they rolled really well.

So, why is bowling so popular in Japan? I dunno, but I tore up the lanes

So, the reason that my story of my trip to Japan took so long is because it is by far the most interesting story that I have. I like teaching English, but I don’t like a lot of the other things that come with it. For example, I have to wear a suit everyday. I also have to shave everyday. When you teach a codomo (kid’s) class, it can sometimes be like trying to snowboard through an avalanche.

I work Tuesday through Saturday, 12pm to 9pm. My classes are generally backloaded into the evenings. My company has a strange rule that NETs must be at work by their starting time, even if they have no classes until later, but that if they finish their classes for the day, NETs are allowed to clock out and leave. So, I sometimes get the feeling that I’m just “there” at the school “all the time”. But those are really my only complaints about working here.

The best parts about working as a teacher (compared to working in a cubicle all day) are that I never get lonely during the day, I don’t get depressed about my job, I feel like I can really help people, and of course, that I get to live in Japan. I think my students really like and appreciate me as a teacher… of course Japanese people are so polite that you can never really be sure ;-).

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been really trying to do different things to improve my Japanese, but I feel like there has been very little effect. That can be a bit frustrating. I’ve noticed that my students seem to improve the most when they focus on improving their listening skills, so that may be the next step for me to concentrate on.

In future entries, I think you’d be interested by my daily routines, my difficulties, and some other interesting things like, “Why is karaoke so popular in Japan?”, so that’s the kind of stuff I’ll try to talk about.

Because the title of this post makes no sense, I think you can guess where it came from.

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While I was waiting for my flight to leave, I saw some unexpected faces. I think that everybody in my training group who was on a later flight was rescheduled to mine because of a scary typhoon that was landing soon in Japan. The flight was JAL, aka Japan Air Lines, which of course means that the crew is Japanese and that most of the movie channels are in Japanese. Yaya.

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Part 2 of Joe’s trek to Japan has been put on hold this week so that I may bring you news of a most devastating sort. I remember thinking before I came here that it would be unforgivable to spend any more time than necessary alone in my apartment. After all, I am here for a limited time, so why not do things here that I can’t do anywhere else? Let’s see how that’s worked out for me so far.

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Now that I have been in Japan for over a week, I thought you’d like to hear a little bit about Canada. I stayed in Vancouver for a week for my GEOS training, and I shared a hotel room with a fun guy named Lonnie. In Japanese, Joe is something like jyo- (ジョー), in other words, it is a word that Japanese people can say easily. However, Lonnie is Lo-ni, which is the same name as “Ronnie”. I’m sure he has fun with that.

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