Tokyo Love and Japan (part 3)

Continuing my excitement for my upcoming novel, Tokyo Love. Being published by Crimson Romance this July.

More fun stories from my adventures in Japan!

One of the most exciting things I got to experience in Japan was teaching summer classes at KA International School.

In Japan there is a lot of pressure on succeeding academically. For any parent that wants their kid to be ahead of the curve, they send them to 'after schools'. So, after a long day in the public school, the kid goes to another school until the evening. 'After schools' have become such a booming business that they compete with one another for the best reputation of helping their students get into better middle schools and better high schools and better colleges. Yes, kids in Japan have to test into their middle and high schools. Some tests they take are rather similar to the American ACT and SAT, but also involve a heavy use of foreign language (English) and a professional interview. It's called the juken test and KA helps 5^th and 6^th graders to pass it.

I won't go too much into my criticism of the Japanese academic situation. One, it's not really my place to criticize since I don't live in Japan (or have school aged children in Japan). Two, KA was a super awesome school, with a great program, great teachers, and amazing kids. I'd love to teach there again. Seriously amazing experience.

The kids at KA were a little different from the normal students. These kids had all either grown up abroad (usually Canada, USA, or UK) or they had a parent that was a foreigner. Many of them had spent the first years of their life in a foreign country and now lived in Japan. Others spent half their year in Japan. In all cases, they came to the school to keep up their English.

At KA, we taught a little differently than most public schools. Since all of us teachers were native English speakers, we tried to keep the classrooms more western as well. Which means there is a lot of class participation, questions and answers are encouraged, and we generally try to be louder. Some kids could get really into this, and some kids were too used to the Japanese method of 'keep your head down and don't get noticed'. There is nothing more depressing than when you ask a question to a group of students and they all stare at you like you are the crazy one.

I taught a range of ages, from K-12^th grade. Most of my classes were only a few kids. Though I did have an eventful day in which I got ten 3^rd graders in one class. My one tip to aspiring grade school teachers; confidence is key. Any troubling students were usually satisfied, however, by entertaining class work and that I usually had some fun games for them to play between learning.

Some highlights of my experience was a kindergartner who was so smart and studious that I could play a game with him for ten minutes, then send him straight back to work with no trouble (he also could write better English sentences than I could at that age). He was the darling of the school.

The one day I actually got to teach some high school kids, I spent half of the class time rambling about Latin roots as pertaining to their vocabulary. I'm pretty sure they thought I was insane, but I think they enjoyed my anecdote about Sextus Molestus.

When I got to teach five kindergartners at once and it was terribly exhausting. But worth it when they all were working and decided to quietly sing every song from Frozen, in perfect English.

The middle school girl with whom I got to talk about poetry with. And totally showed her some clips from Lord of the Rings. Because I am a nerd.

My amazement when I found that if the attention is lagging, just let the kids write on the whiteboard. Writing on the whiteboard is the best thing ever. Also stamps, everyone loves getting a stamp.

Discussing Frozen a lot. Let me tell you, the Japanese love Frozen. So all Japanese kids love Frozen. Elsa is their favorite character. How dare you suggest otherwise.

Fun fact, after Frozen came out, the top songs on the Japanese Charts was 1. Let it Go (theatrical version) 2. Let it Go (pop version) 3. Let it Go (Japanese version).

Last fond memory, having a normal class with some 3^rd and 4^th graders, and hearing my sister yelling at her students through the walls. Good times.

Tokyo Love and Japan (part 2)

Continuing my excitement for my upcoming novel, Tokyo Love. Being published by Crimson Romance this July.

More fun stories from my adventures in Japan!

This one also takes place during my first trip to Japan and was actually one of the first things I did after stopping off in Tokyo.

My sister is a part of many traditional music groups in Japan. One of them is gagaku, traditional Japanese court music. My sister plays the shō, which I have seen described as a mouth organ and has a very particular sound that is a bit unforgettable. Seriously, youtube some gagaku or shō, you won't regret it.

Anyway, the shō section of her gagaku group decided to have a mountainous retreat together to practice and have fun. Since I was staying with her at the time, I was invited as a guest. The only other guest happened to be a young daughter of another shō player.

This girl was very friendly and polite and knew very little English. I, of course, knew even less Japanese. But for an entire afternoon, while my sister and the other shō players rehearsed, we only had each other to entertain.

For anyone who has tried to spend an afternoon with someone they cannot fundamentally communicate with, a very strange thing happens; you learn to understand each other. It is hard for me to describe how it happened. But after some faulty starts, we mutually decided to simply stop trying to speak the other's language and just talk. I'd blather on in English about how nice and cool the weather was on the mountain and she'd respond in Japanese.

We went for a walk, found some trails, took some pictures. At some point, I got pretty thirsty, so I said I wanted to get a drink. She understood me enough that we went and found a small store and she picked out a juice for me (and helped me pay for it. Children are too nice). As we were heading back to the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) we came across a rather pretty lizard hanging out on the side of the path. I took a picture and told her that lizards could lose their tails and just grow another one back (see? pretty inane dialogue on my part) she responded and we went back to our rooms.

In the rooms, we watched some Japanese TV and she got out some paper and scissors she had brought. Then, right before my eyes, she cut out a paper lizard, then snipped off the tail and threw it in the air. I have no idea if she understood what I said earlier, or if she simply knew the same inane facts that I did.

On the TV, an actress came on to some talk show. She pointed to the woman and called her hafu, which means that the woman was only half-Japanese. It was the beginning of my understanding of the monoculture that is Japan.

It is a strange thing to say, but there are a lot of Japanese people in Japan. Coming from America, where any city street could have ten different nationalities, seeing someone that is different from myself isn't a big deal. But in Japan being only half-Japanese is an oddity.

I don't know if that girl thought I would appreciate seeing someone on the TV that might have seemed just as foreign as myself. Or if she was simply making small talk. 

Tokyo Love

So an exciting update!

This July, I will be having a new romance novel coming out, Tokyo Love. Published by Crimson Romance.

Please witness the beautiful cover…

I'm super excited! I've always wanted to write a novel that takes place in Japan. What better way to express it than to write a romance based around the tropes of all my favorite shōjo manga tropes? I've got café dates, shrine visits, getting drunk at a nomikai, hanabi, hanami, Nikko, New Years, and I've even got a love robot.

Why yes, I am a weeb.

So I've decided to write a small blog series of some of my experiences in Japan that helped inspire the novel.

Some background on why I've been to Japan multiple times: my sister lives there. She has been living there for about 8 years now, studying traditional music in Tokyo. Taking a trip to Japan isn't very cheap, but it really cuts on cost when you can sleep on your sister's floor for free haha.

I guess the first story I'll share is probably my favorite experience of Japan. It also happened the first time I visited (at age 19) and it also has zero relevance to my novel. Besides the whole… being in Japan thing…

So, just in case it wasn't clear, I watch a lot of anime. My taste really ranges from actually well-done, meaningful anime, to pure trash anime. No, seriously, I can enjoy Baccano and Junjō Romantica in the same sitting. I have no class.

Well, one of my favorite anime is Hikaru no Go. Which may look like a typical gaming/sports anime from the outside, but trust me it is beautiful and makes me weep. Anyway, it involves something of a road trip from Tokyo to this super tiny island outside of Hiroshima called Innoshima (not to be mistaken with Enoshima). What is on Innoshima? A tiny Go museum with a graveyard that has the grave of Honinbō Shūsaku.

For the uninitiated, Go is a Japanese game similar to chess. Here's the picture from the Wikipedia page. 

Honinbō Shūsaku is a famous Japanese Go player from the 19^th century and was born in Innoshima.

If you watch Hikaru no Go, you'll understand why this is super nerdy and not just super lame of me to want to go to this landmark.

Anyway, back to reality… Innoshima isn't exactly the easiest place to get to from Tokyo. It's about 4 hours on shinkansen to Hiroshima. Then you have to take local trains to Onomichi Station, and then a bus to the actual island. Well, we made it on to Innoshima, but from where the bus dropped us off, it was still a ways to the museum and gravesite. So we opted to try to catch another local bus.

We waited for probably over thirty minutes. We were beginning to lose hope that a bus would ever come. (Japanese public transportation can be pretty flawless, but we were rather in the boonies of Japan at this point). We began to notice this van of Japanese boys was cruising around town and had totally passed us a couple times. We began to joke that they were stunned by the sight of foreigners on their tiny island and would probably try to pick us up the next time they passed.

And they did! My sister was able to talk to them in Japanese and asked them to take us to the Go museum. They were super eager and friendly and really bad at driving. To this day, I am convinced that they had never talked to a foreigner in their lives. They could barely find the Go museum (even though it was a tiny island) and my sister managed to convince them that we didn't want to go out for drinks later.

At the museum, which is only a couple rooms large, we were greeted by the director of the museum (who had possibly never gotten foreigners at his museum before) and who gave us a personal tour of everything in the museum. When he found out that I knew very little Japanese, he attempted to explain everything in simple Japanese words and phrases. Which mostly helped my sister, I still was lost (I mean, the Japanese I knew was dumb phrases I had heard in anime. So totally useless). So then he also started acting everything out. This grown man hopped around like a rabbit and crawled into a closet for the sake of my understanding. It was beautiful.

Then a friend of his came to the museum to play a game of Go and he let us watch. Admitting later that he was super nervous. Which, honestly, my sister and I barely understand the fundamentals of Go. We could hardly judge his strategy.

We went off to find the grave of Honinbō Shūsaku. It was the first time I've ever been in a Japanese graveyard (more like gravecity!) and it was up on the hill, giving us a great view of the small town.

For reference, here is a picture of the grave that my sister took

And the view!

When we returned to the museum, the director gave us a lift back to the bus station. There, we met a stranger who complimented my skin, saying it was very pale. But I think I could write a whole ten blogs about the differences in Japanese vs Western aesthetics and why I received many compliments on my white skin.

Over all, Trip to Innoshima? 10/10 would travel there again.

Look forward to see none of this anecdote in the novel! Haha!