Will Miss #23 - relationship with my students (reflection)

My teaching profile sheet from my last job at an eikaiwa (conversation school). 

Hands down, this is the one thing that I can say without reservation has gotten harder to bear over time. My relationship with my students was not one of friendship or scholarship, but more of a therapeutic one in which I largely functioned as a counselor and they as clients. The biggest part of good therapy is

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Random Memories #35

All of the memories I have written about so far in this series relate to time spent in Japan, but the truth is that my relationship with it began shortly after it began with my boyfriend. A lot of the things that I use to talk about my memories pre-date my ever having set foot on Japanese soil. They are the souvenirs of things that he sent me as part of our correspondence and I learned a lot

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Won't Miss #517 - no root beer

Wine candy? Sure. No root beer barrels, though.

Life is full of tiny little pleasures. In fact, if you can focus on those, you will be a much happier person in general since the small ones come along so often and the big ones so infrequently. Growing up, my family used to go to an A&W drive-in restaurant (now long out of business) and root beer is an old-fashioned pleasure. It's so associated

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Will Miss #516 - less emphasis on money

One thing that I was aware of long before I left Japan was that the emphasis in America is largely on money. Your value as a person is determined by your ability to earn cash. Your value to the family is determined by what you bring to the bank account or what you take away. An acquaintance, whose family of origin is from a Middle Eastern culture, said that, there, family was most important,

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Random Thoughts: Moving

This was our living room within days of our departure from Japan. Four suitcases were all we took back with us. We didn't ship anything. It was just 4 suitcases. Here is what it looked like before we started tearing it apart.

My husband and I lived in Tokyo for 23 years and we did not move once. It wasn't because we had a great landlord, though we did. It wasn't because we liked our apartment

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Won't Miss #22 - pretty, but bland pastries (reflection)

As people get older, their taste buds are supposed to weaken such that they can't taste things as they could when they were younger. That's why they supposedly start to like strong-tasting food like Limburger cheese, brawnschweiger, raw onion, and mustard. I believe that, while it is true that people's taste buds change as they age, I also think that we build can obliterate the sensitivity of

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Will Miss #22 - station shopping malls (reflection)

Some time late last year, my husband and I ventured to an area we hadn't been to before and he suggested we walk to the local train station to see what was happening around there. The answer was "nothing". Later, we went to another one that he had been to before and recalled had sold some souvenirs and whatnot. As we approached the building, I actually felt a little excited. Once inside, I

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Random Memories #34

A diagram of our apartment as it was in 1996. I drew it in some little drawing program made by Apple.

In Baye McNeil's book, "Hi, My Name is Loco and I am a Racist", he talks about his roommates thinking that he's doing something incredibly weird in his room because they detect an unusual odor emanating from it. In the end, they figured out that the aroma was not generated by Baye or anything

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Won't Miss #516 - terrible organics

This guy was hanging in front of the organic food shop. See, he's not too happy with it either. ;-)


There was an organic food store near my local station when I lived in Asagaya in Tokyo. You can always tell a shop that sells food untouched by the brutal hand of pesticides by the fact that it has a bunch of brown, wilted, nasty-looking fruit and vegetables whereas all of the other shops have

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Misc. Blog Stuff and Feedly

I've already posted about this on my other blog, the one about junk food, and I wanted to say a word here. Most bloggers, including me, are getting regular readership from people who subscribe using an RSS reader. Many of my readers are using Google Readers, as I did for quite a few years. The awesomeness of such readers is that they allow you to track when new content is available without

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Will Miss #515 - reliability of utilities

I've lived in my apartment in California for only 6 months, and have already experienced one utility-based problem. The water was shut off for a period of two hours to do some sort of maintenance. I was given a 24-hour notice of this fact 19 hours before the shut-off occurred and it was actually off for closer to 2 1/2 hours. This isn't such a big deal except for the fact that when the water

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Random Memories #33

A business card from my husbands employer. The school has been defunct for a long time.

This is my last random memory related to working for Nova when I first moved to Japan. The other entries are here: first, second, third.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Nova had a bad reputation among teachers as a company that cheated employees. Given that fact, one may wonder why on earth I'd try to

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Won't Miss #21 - cockroaches (reflection)

As I mentioned in my original post, there are roaches everywhere in the world, but the ones I encountered in Japan were bigger and more plentiful. Nothing in my experience since returning has changed that perception. In fact, since coming home, and living in three different places and two different states, I haven't seen one roach. Of course, I haven't hung out in many seedy dives or back

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Will Miss #21 - not carrying a purse (reflection)

This was something which I didn't think much about it when I was in Japan, and it did make sense when I speculated on it, but I've found that it is absolutely true that I didn't need a purse then, but I do need one now. The old backpack served me very well when I was dealing with public transportation and schlepping around Tokyo, but I find that I need a different type of gear here.



First

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Random Memories #32

Note: This is somewhat of a continuation of my two previous posts (here and here), though it is not necessary to have read them to follow this.



It has often been said that people get the government they deserve. I believe this is true. I also believe that, in the 80's in Japan, language schools got the types of teachers they deserved based on how they hired them and how they were treated.

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