As promised, this blog is about some of the things that make us (as westerners) scratch our heads in befuddlement regarding the Japanese. Some of these things I’ve learned, some of them I experienced, and some of them I’m just as confused as you about them! Anyway….enjoy! They are in no particular order….
#1: One thing that I never understood about my schools is that they keep the pool water in the pool all year long. That’s right. They don’t cover it in winter. Right now the water is a nice green slimy color that looks more akin to a farm pond instead of a school swimming pool. It gets pretty gross… Come June the water is crystal clear and beautiful, but wait a few months for swimming season to end, and that water is disgusting! This is totally surprising because the Japanese are ridiculously and diligently clean. One of my friends explained to me why it is this way. None of the school have fire hydrants. (In fact, I don’t remember seeing fire hydrants anywhere in Japan. Maybe I’m just not looking…..) Therefore, the schools save the pool water as a reserve just in case of a fire. I’m assuming that the fire fighters have pumps and such to get the water out. It definitely explains why they would let the water get in that condition!
#2: Since I was sick last Wednesday, I didn’t get to have my Valentine’s Day lesson for my 4th graders. However, the schedule was changed, and I taught the lesson this week at school. It might have been a week late, but it all went well. My 4th grade teacher is a delightful man who speaks English pretty well. As the kids were busy making Valentine cards, he said, “Melissa-sensei, I am surprised that you celebrate Valentine’s Day.” This perked my interest, so I asked him what he meant. He said, “Valentine’s Day is a Japanese holiday.” ………….what??? This guy is a very smart and well-traveled man, but I had to explain to him that no, Valentine’s Day is NOT a Japanese holiday and is celebrated all over the world. He was surprised that it was celebrated outside of Japan. While I didn’t go into the history of Valentine’s Day originating with St. Valentine way back when, I was completely blown away that he thought that Valentine’s Day was a Japanese holiday. 
#3: All members of a Japanese family sleep in the same room. Unless the children are above a certain age (the grown-and-gone age), children sleep in the same room as their parents. Everyone has his/her own futon and put them side-by-side in the same room. This kind of makes sense in a way. Since Japanese homes lack central heating and air, everyone crowds into that one room so that only one room has to be heated/cooled. On the other hand, questions arise about privacy. What if the baby starts crying? Does everyone wake up? What if someone gets up to use the bathroom? Does it wake everyone? When do the mommy and daddy get to have “alone time”? Does everyone wake up when the first alarm goes off? All good questions……
#4: Japan does NOT like PDAs. Husbands and wives or boyfriends and girlfriends will rarely hold hands, hug, love on each other, or even (gasp!) kiss in public. Especially out here in the countryside where people are VERY conservative you don’t see that type of thing. PDAs might be SLIGHTLY more common in the city, but in general PDAs just don’t happen here. Yesterday as I was coming home, Ian was leaving for work. We met on the street, and I kissed him goodbye. Some elementary school girls saw us, and they absolutely FREAKED OUT. They squealed, giggled, and harassed me about it like there was no tomorrow. Spoiler alert, Japan: I kiss my husband. Shocking, I know! In America, I know that elementary kids have seen people kiss. It’s no big deal. However, I might as well have striped off all of my clothes and ran around the neighborhood naked because that one little kiss made about the same amount of pandemonium that a naked run would have.
#5: Kids do not understand “nah-nah-nah-boo-boo.” While we were playing tag, I tried to show the kids how to affectively use nah-nah-nah-boo-boo by sticking my butt out and shaking it to taunt whoever was “it”. The kids copied me, thinking that it was hilarious. However, they took it a little too far. Instead of doing just what I taught them, some of the boys started pulling their pants down (revealing their naked backsides) and shaking their butts. 
My immediate thought was PLEASE DEAR GOD DON’T LET ANY OF THE OTHER TEACHERS SEE THIS. Needless to say, I put a stop to the nah-nah-nah-boo-boo-ing.
#6: If there is Japanese right beside English, Japanese students will automatically read the Japanese without regarding the English. For example, the one grocery store in town is called Sun Road. It’s written out both in romanji, aka the English alphabet, and in katakana, the Japanese alphabet that is used for foreign words. (I can’t say that I completely begrudge my students on this one because I do the say thing. If I see “juice” printed next to the Japanese word “ジュース" (ju-su), my mind automatically focuses on the English text.) I played a game in class the other day called “sentence scramble”. I gave each group sentences with the words all scrambled up. It was their task to rearrange the words into a correct order to make a sentence. The corrected sentence was “Did you see Melissa at Sun Road yesterday?” I gave this sentence to my second graders at the JHS. They are completely capable of reading each and every word in that sentence, yet I was blown away by their confusion. They had no idea what “Sun Road” was, so I’d get sentences like “Did Sun you see Melissa Road at yesterday?” or “Did Melissa at Road yesterday Sun?” Whenever I said “Sun Road” out loud, I could see the light bulbs going on over their heads. Since they read the katakana of Sun Road their whole lives, it never occurred to them that the romanji of their grocery would look like: Sun Road.
#7: The nape of the neck is considering sexy. 
Watch out ladies and gents, I’m not wearing a turtleneck today, and my hair’s in a ponytail. Yep, I’m showing off my sexy spot. I don’t know why, but that area of the body along with the shoulders are considering sexy. That’s why sleeveless tops (no matter how conservative they might be) are NOT appropriate for the work place. It makes a lot of sense because most of my female teachers who have long hair never pull it back. IF they do, it’s in a simple low ponytail, still covering their neck. I only recently found this out, so I guess I’m considered to be the office skank since I wear my hair up a lot. For me a medium to high ponytail or bun is a quick-and-easy hairdo for those days that my hair is too………”lively” to wear down. Little did I know that I was showing off my sexy neck…… 
On the other hand, legs, considered to be sexy in the western world, aren’t here. That also makes total sense considering that I’ll see girls wearing impossibly short skirts with tights underneath….yes….those tights totally make wearing a skirt that short okay. 
Also, I see a lot of women wearing deadly hooker heels. Wearing 6-inch heels in the western world would definitely draw attention to a woman’s legs, (and therefore her sexuality) but here it just doesn’t have the same connotation. Interesting!
#8: The Japanese use kerosene heaters like it’s no one’s business. In the winter, kerosene heaters are one of the main ways to heat a house. Before coming to Japan, I don’t know that I could have even picked a kerosene heater out of a manly-looking-tools lineup. However, now I know how to use one, how to refill one, and can even operate one that has zero English on it. 
Ian and I both love our kerosene heater because it makes our house toasty warm. I enjoy curling up in front of it because it reminds me of laying in front of the fireplace on those winter afternoons at my grandmother’s house. Ahhh, nostalgia!
#9 This one doesn’t really have anything to do with things that the Japanese do, but I still found it quite funny. The other day I was playing tag with my kids at the elementary school. There are some great bushes near the teacher’s room windows that are carved in a certain way that make excellent hiding spots. Some of my kids were hiding in the bushes, and I thought that they had such great ideas to hide there! So I also hid. It wasn’t two minutes later that the vice principal opened the window and started yelling the kids to get out of the bushes and that they knew they weren’t supposed to be in there. 
You better believe that I was plastered to the ground to avoid being seen by anyone as the kids accepted the shame speech and yelling from the vice principal. After the window was shut, I quietly slid out of the bushes to avoid being caught and echoed the VP’s sentiments, “……yeah, kids……so…….don’t hide in the bushes…….yeah……it’s bad……yeah.”
In other news this week…..we had shaken preformed on our car. Shaken is a mandatory check-up that car owners have to have every other year. You have to take your car to the mechanic, who checks it, and then charges you an arm and a leg for it. I believe that I wrote about this previously and said that the guy quoted us a price of 100,000 (about $1,000). When you live in Japan, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet…… 
When Ian went to pick up the car yesterday, the guy said the only thing that was wrong with our car was the brakes, and he changed those. The total price for our shaken was 62,000 (about $650). Although we basically paid that much for new brakes and a car wash, it was a LOT better than the 100,000 we thought we were going to pay!
Alright. That’s all I’ve got for now. Enjoy the weekend, y’all!
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