Children in Japan

One of the first things you will notice when you first come to Japan is that most children are totally different than any children in your home country. You will notice this first on the train. When I see a child staring at me, I usually make a little face at them and they laugh or make a face back and play with me. But Japanese children don't do that. They usually give me a scathing look like I just did something really stupid and then they look away, disinterested. It's so funny! How do Japanese parents get their kids to have so much self-control at such a young age?

This is really important to remember if you come here to teach children. Western people usually have a totally different style of teaching children and they tend to try to get the kids all riled up and stoked by acting extra excited and animated. But this usually just makes the teacher tired and confuses the kids, who don't know what to make of the crazy person jumping around and speaking a foreign language. I just discovered a great blog by a girl called Reannon who gives the best advice for people teaching children in Japan. She calls it "A Lazy Teacher's Guide to teaching English" but it's not lazy at all. It's a really accurate post and it's something most teachers take far too long to learn when they first arrive here. I wish I had read something like this when I first came here a year ago.

I also wish I had read THIS one because it would have helped me understand that you have to approach teaching Japanese kids with authority from the very start. If you don't do that, they won't respect you and you can't get that respect after you've started with a first impression that's silly. I used to teach kids in Tokyo and Reannon is dead on spot. Teaching children in Japan can also be very, very depressing so you should be aware of that before you start. If you teach English to children in Japan, you can also be aware that kids here absolutely love playing rock, paper, scissors more than anything else. In Japan, it's called "Janken" and Japanese kids have complicated, fast games that we never had when I was a kid. Some games involve jumping up and down stairs depending on who wins and loses. They also play this ultracompetitive rock, paper, scissors game in Hong Kong.

So this post sort of changed into being about Reannon's website. Reannon's blog is really good. She's very different from me in a good way, so if you want to get an opinion from a girl who is in the same situation as me but has very different interests and ideas about life and about Japan, please check out Reannon's site. She writes in a more "culture shock" style than I do, but I agree with and can relate to so much of what she writes. I have been reading through her blog and keep laughing and having these moments of, "ohhh! I know what she means! I never thought of it like that, but it has happened to me, too." She's really funny and smart, a great writer and a cute girl who posts tons of photos of Japan.

These posts were especially good;
-Where she talks about how she has a Japanese roommate she can't speak to at all but really finds fascinating is HERE.
-Where she talks about how difficult it is for people who travel a lot to fit in again when they go back home is HERE.
-Where she talks about the differences between Japanese blogs and Western blogs is HERE.
-Where she talks about why she thinks that Japan is youth-obsessed is HERE. And it is. I have regularly been asked with a straight face what my favorite Disney character is by Japanese adults. I usually just say, "The Little Mermaid" now because if I say that I have no interest at all in anything related to Disney, the conversation gets awkward. THIS is another really thoughtful post about Japan's obsession with cute things. (For the record, most of my Japanese friends here are not the kinds of people who care about manga or cartoon characters or toys marketed towards adults. It is a stereotype, though an especially accurate one.)

In other news, like clockwork the moron did it again. In the first sentence of her food-review article. Why does this lady bother me so much? She needs to just name her column, "My husband is Japanese and I don't speak Japanese" so that she can just get those two facts out of the way early and do her job, which is to write about restaurants. Her articles are so bad that I feel like I'm reading The Onion. It's a special level of horrible.

AND!
The misunderstanding between my friend and I got sorted out. Thanks for all your advice and kind words, especially Naben's email.