くだもの , いろいろ, sometimes by my bloody valentine

Hylton and I recently started incorporating ginger into our cooking, and man, has that turned out to be a good idea! I think my favorite dinner to make here is stir-fried vegetables with udon (thich wheat noodles), usually with tofu but sometimes with egg. Things go in and out of season, obviously, but eggplant, onion, carrot, garlic and mushrooms are mostly a constant. And maybe it is because we live close to where at least some of this stuff is being grown (mostly scallions/leeks --someone please tell me the difference--, peanuts, yams), but I think we get this stuff at better prices than in the cities. I've seen big vegetable displays in train stations and thought, hah! I can top that.

My love of vegetables was awakened in Germany, but fruit is still the cornerstone of my culinary heart. My mother delights in telling "embarrassing" stories from my youth, and the image that gets me is a four year old Meredith carrying fruit around the house, one piece in each arm, just to have it near. Walking to the top of the driveway and rolling it down, bruising it over and over again. It is hard to tell how much of this has been embellished over the years, but I don't think its that important.

Anyhow, my first romance in Japan was with kaki (柿 , or so I could read it: かき), or persimmons. Oh, sweet persimmon season. It lasted from about September to December, and I genuinely grieved it's passing. It seemed like every house had a persimmon tree, and thus prices were usually nice and low. What an amazing fruit. After kaki came mikan, which I still don't know the exact translation for. I thought they were basically mandarin oranges, but I guess they are more like the mandarin's cousin. Then after mikan came what is yet another relative of the orange... but not exactly an orange. Hylton and I got into an argument about this and thus I will leave its classification at that. And now, especially here in Naruto, STRAWBERRY season. いちごがだいき. ほんとだよ! I remember saying strawberries were my favorite fruit for a long time, but in the past years we've backed off a little from each other, but now we're right back where we belong. I've mentioned before that Naruto is "famous for strawberries," and we are going strawberry picking in a few weekends. Hylton and I don't make a ton of money so when I get strawberries I usually get the cheapest kind from the grocery store, but there are little strawberry stands set up all over the place (they are permanent structures, they are just closed most of the year) around here. If you couldn't read いちご then you would be able to spot the stands by the FLASHING RED SIREN LIGHTS posted outside almost every one. Japan is extreme about colors and flashing lights, let me tell you. I bike past a bunch of these places, but have only ever been inside one, and there were five or six different varieties of strawberries they let you sample. The most amazing thing was that though they all were delicious, all the varieties had really different tastes.

Anyhow, as one of my students would say, "I like fruits." I have been bad and haven't been studying Japanese lately. It mostly started when I was so miserable (sick) at work, and then later it was just easy to use my free time to stare at maps of Malaysia (Taman Negara I am coming for you!) instead of grammar charts. I don't know why Japanese is so difficult for me, there are things about it that should make it way easier than other languages I've taken a swing at. I guess Latin roots are my friends. Anyhow, I picked up my grammar book again today with inspiration from my third year (junior high) students.

Last Monday and Tuesday I ate my school lunch not at my desk with the biddies gossiping away behind me (maybe I'm being harsh), but with 3D, a class of soon-to-be-graduated 15 year old junior high students. I had wanted to do this before, but kind of didn't know how to go about it. Anyhow, long story short, I was talking with some of the girls in 3D (hah) after my last lesson with them (which I didn't find out until that morning... I am most definitely the least informed staff member at that school), and some were saying they would miss me, which really melted my heart. So I was like, well, maybe I could come eat lunch with you? And then I almost wished I hadn't brought it up, because even if they didn't like the idea they would probably feel obligated to act like that was a fantastic suggestion. It looked like it was a new idea to them, but they seemed to go for it, so a few hours later I trudged up the stairs with my light green tray (on which always sits a bowl of rice and a carton of milk). I had gotten there way too early, because in every class the appointed students bring up all the trays and bowls and big silver boxes of food, and then dish it out for everyone. So I sat there at Yuka's desk for awhile, until it was time to push the desks together in the lunch group pattern (roughly 6 people to a group). It was a little awkward, because they all (all girls) kind of seemed self conscious, even though we were speaking in both English and Japanese. But it was interesting to watch what was going around me, and how the students talked to each other, and even what they talked about, when I could make it out.

The homeroom teacher, eating at his desk, would occasionally call out a question, supposedly for one of the students to translate into English for me. It was kind of weird, because he was never really addressing me, even though I understood most of his questions (the most personality-revealing of which was: "What's your favorite hamburger place in Japan?"). He would also ask these questions when I was in the middle of a conversation with someone else, which is often a kind of involved affair if we are trying to figure out what the other person is talking about. Anyhow, I really liked hanging out with them... for exactly what reason I couldn't really say. I think I am at a good age for them- old enough that I am interesting, but young enough that I still know whats up. Presumably.

After those two lunches our schedules worked such that I couldn't eat with them again that week, and even though I wanted to with them yesterday (Monday), I felt kind of lame about asking them. (Am I really worried about 15 year olds thinking I am lame?) Luckily, Monday afterschool, Yuka, armed with Yasuyo and another girl, came into the teacher's room and asked me if I would eat with them the next day. So today around 12:40 I trudged up those same stairs with a different but identical light green tray, still with rice, always with milk. The kid who always comes and asks me about Pearl Harbor came and showed me some manga-esque drawings whose authorship I couldn't really ascertain. My host Yuka, in her organized fashion, showed me to her desk while I waited for the desk-rearranging time to begin.

I don't think it is too much of a generalization to say that all Japanese people eat extremely fast. And since we only have so much time to eat, I had to try to shovel food and think of discussion-worthy topics to bring up at the same time. I guess because of that we didn't get much chitchat in today, but after we put away our trays and the teacher left, a couple of the girls brought out disposable cameras, and I ran and got my digital as well. We called Ryo, the boy I worked with at the beginning of the year for the English speech contest, over multiple times to be our photographer. Man, I just really want to be everyone's friend.

It sounds strange to say, but I have been really surprised with how much I care about the students. I guess that has been one of the biggest surprises through this experience. It isn't that I came here hating kids and now I can't wait to pop out my own in contribution to overpopulation, but I really feel... I guess the best way to express it is that I feel like I want everyone to study really hard, make me their penpal, then come out and visit me in California once they are college-aged or something. That sounds kind of weird. I guess I just want to be a good role model, and make the students want to do something more than staff out one of the billion 7-11's in the vicinity. I think I had expected to come here and learn a lot about the language, the culture, the food... but the job was kind of cursory. If anything I thought the in depth look into language would interest me the most, but what I didn't foresee was the constraints of The (Educational) System, or just how different (and therefore difficult) Japanese and English are. And kids are funny?

For, really months, I got the feeling I was being mocked. Whether it was in hellos or goodbyes, students seemed too eager, too loud or something. It really took me a long time to be able to differentiate that with what is real mocking (which happens fairly seldom). I don't remember when it was, but it was really just one day like any another when it hit me that kids are just kind of loud and energetic like that normally, even the famously morose junior high set. Once I got rid of that suspicion I was being made fun of, life in the halls got a lot more fun.



The third years graduate next week, two weeks earlier than school gets out for the rest of the students. I'll miss them, they are my favorite. :/