Currently I am living in a mansion in Osaka. It is probably around 200 square feet and includes a bathroom, kitchenette/dining cubicle, a tiny patio, and living room/bedroom. There are no butlers in my mansion, and the people who live in the mansions around me typically ride the train or bicycles, and work as English teachers. No a mansion in Japan is not the same thing as a mansion in the western world.
When I was first told that we were going to a pension, I had no idea what my Japanese friends were talking about. Unlike the pension plan, which is a pain in the ass, pensions are quite pleasant. I guess the pension would best be described as a family run hotel.
Of the pensions I have stayed at, the Starry Pension in Aso-machi (Kumamoto-ken) and Zion in Hakuba (Nagano-ken) are my favorites. The rooms have a nice, cozy feeling. As opposed to the hermetically-sealed and sterile vibe in regular hotels, the accommodations are clean but lend the feeling that you are home away from home.
At both of these pensions the food is first-class. Both places serve up European-style multi-course dinner sets and continental breakfasts. The meals are delicious and served in large proportions. They’re a nice break if you’ve been subsisting on fish, rice, tsukemono, and other traditional Japanese foods. My favorite would have to be the bacon-wrapped filet mignon at Zion, and the lasagna-like tofu gratin at Starry.
The surrounding areas around these pensions are awesome if you enjoy getting out into nature. I think one of the best times to visit these mountainous regions is during the middle of summer, when your shoes fuse to the asphalt in the cities of Japan.
Starry is right at the base of Aso Mountain, and you can a number of activities from this central location such as hiking, golfing, paragliding, sight seeing, driving, or onsen hopping. They also have three family-style onsens that you can relax in- one of them offers a view of the starry skies above (the stars are amazingly clear in both Aso and Hakuba).
Zion is a terrific place, and has many of the same type of activities that the Aso area has to offer. Arguably, the best part about Hakuba is the skiing and snowboarding resorts. 47 is within 15 minutes by car, and you can walk to Happo.
I think the part that I enjoyed the most about staying at the pensions was interacting with the people who worked at these places, and talking with other people on vacation. It’s always nice to sit around the hearth with a nice frosty beer and to chat when everyone is on vacation. The people who run these pensions enjoy providing good service to their guests, and the regulars develop a close relationship. Because of this, everything is much more relaxed and staying at a pension is a much more intimate experience than staying in a hotel.

This morning I had some extra time to burn before going into work, so I decided to walk around the neighborhood. I found this awesome shrine a block away, and made offerings to the giant head.
It felt as if I had entered the world of Big Trouble in Little China, but Egg was nowhere to be found. I did, however, feel that I could see things that no one else can see, and do things that no one else can do.

If you only glimpsed at the school grounds (not the facilities within the school building), you would be under the impression that this high school is a wonderful place. There are massive gardens, hot houses where flowers, fruit, and produce are cultivated, fields planted with a variety of crops, ponds, landscaping displays, fountains, copses of various trees, groves, hedges, flower beds, a ton of potted plants, and on an equally vast amount of land is where all of the tools and materials necessary to make and maintain these grounds are contained.
In the garden (which could really be called a park, because it isn’t really that small), there is a large pond, complete with birds of all kinds, and other wildlife. Every lunch break at this school is spent outdoors, among the nature. It is during this time when I am truly able to relax, and achieve clarity of mind. It is here where I can coalesce my ideas into working lesson plans.
Outdoor lessons sound pretty good to me, but that’s because I’m not out in the fields with a hoe, spreading manure around in the hot sun. However, watching the students working towards achieving something tangible- watching them work so hard at clipping hedges, cleaning their tools, using surveying equipment, and working in the fields is making me want to keep them busy in a similar way. I saw no cell phones out, no students applying make up, no one reading manga, and although they were chattering it didn’t matter because they could do two things at one time.
For a low-level school, the surrounding school grounds are among the best I’ve seen at any type of school. It’s just the facilities inside of the school building that suck.

My students are good kids, albeit not very good students, and they could have turned out much differently had they been raised in a better system and given more attention to their personal needs. They have been raised as part of the same kumi (group) for most of their life, and brought up in misguided social environment where the needs of the individual are neglected by the educational institution which instead grades and labels the groups much like eggs in the supermarket. In this school, any spark of interest that they may have had in all of their subjects has been mostly extinguished and coated with fire retardant. They have a belief that they can’t accomplish even the simplest of tasks because that’s the way it has been for many of them for most of their school lives. Many of them come from broken homes and have emotional problems and learning disabilities.
No, they are not purely victims of society. If they had studied harder, then they would have been able to go to a better high school. As a collective, they are the symptoms of a vicious social disease that has been festering for a long time, but is hidden with shame.
Enter the life of a modern low-level high school teacher. Many of them have been in this same school for years, and they face pressures different for those experienced by teachers back home. They are expected to help raise the students (parents are too busy for this, I am told), to motivate them in their studies and extracurricular activities, and most importantly to impose societal values upon them (on a side note, at this school the emphasis is to keep them off the streets and to shuttle them into low-level employment after they graduate).
Unlike chugakko and shogakko teachers in Kumamoto, the teachers in Osaka stay put for a long chunk of time. Teachers deal with this in different ways:
One of my teachers is a very cheerful person, but she suggested that I don’t stress too much about class and just take it easy and concentrate on the good students- advice that I am trying to follow and adjust my teaching style to.
Another teacher gets stressed when she sees the students reading comics, sleeping, chatting, or texting on their phones. Since the first day, I have saved myself the stress by choosing the path of least resistance instead of being the bad cop.
The other teacher that I teach with tells me that he wants my lessons to be very interesting, but also has made it clear that he has no interest in suggesting lesson material or developing lessons with me. His hobbies are sleeping and watching TV. I have decided to just use him to translate my directions into Japanese when I can’t manage it myself, and you can see the relief on his face.
I worry about the future of Japan. I look at this system, this vicious cycle that is spurning it’s youth and turning them into a society that is trained to think the same as what’s being said by people on TV, to always want the newest things that they see advertised in commercials, and that have either unattainable goals (roughly 50 percent of my students want to be a celebrity, professional athlete, or pro-racer) or set their goals very low with no hopes of improving their lot in life (to jobs that they are certain to get, but probably don’t want to do). There is no “The Little Engine That Could” mindset over here. It’s kind of like “1984” and “Animal Farm”, and it may well be heading toward ” Fahrenheit 451″.
The population is shrinking over here, and the old generation and their values are being replaced by consecutively newer generations with different values. I look at the kids that I’m teaching today and I can just see a massive mess, steadily growing larger before my eyes.
I feel like I’m on a huge battleship that has an appearance of technological superiority with ample fire power and spiffy counter-measures, like tomahawk missiles, vulcan machine guns to shoot down any incoming missiles, and a nuclear-powered propulsion system. Unfortunately, the crew is turning a blind eye to the foundation upon which this technology sits. Under the waterline, the hull is being ignored and has rusted almost to the point of structural failure, being held together by duct tape and other improvised, haphazardly implemented maintenance operations. What will happen when the barnacles chew through the rust, and the hull starts to slowly give way to the sea? Will it make it back to port, and be repaired in a timely fashion, or will they just continue to slap pitch into the holes and pray for the best?
I have also met some really talented, interesting, and motivated people who think differently and have the drive to accomplish things. Their creativity, will to succeed, and happiness are truly inspiring, but they are merely the most visible segment of society over here. What I’m worried about is that the proportion of unmotivated youth that live a life devoted to instant gratification is getting bigger. This is going to make the big problems that Japanese society is facing even more difficult to deal with.
Ah, thinking on a macro-societal level can be so depressing. But screw it. You know what? It’s nice weather out today, and I haven’t even begun to explore around Northern Osaka. I’m going to finish my day here, go out in the sun, and enjoy all of the everyday wonders that I come across. And I will use those images to try and think of ways to help individual students think differently, develop their interests, and have fun.

I was planning on saving this lesson for a time when I would really need it, but since I had asked for special preparations, the footballs arrived and we were scheduled in to use the gym.
This lesson has been successful everywhere, with no exceptions. I have used it in elementary, junior high, and high schools with students ranging from gifted and rich to hopeless and poor. I wish I could teach football every day in English class.
The best part about the lesson is that girls get into football even more than the guys sometimes. When I taught some JHS students how to catch and throw the pigskin, the girls were always the first to claim the pigskin, and played all break long.
It’s equally amusing to watch the ADD kids lob bullets at each other as they run full speed, looking over their shoulder. I can still hear the THUD of one boy’s impact into the side of the gymnasium wall…

I haven’t been able to post regularly for a while, but I will try and rectify the situation soon. The problem lies with my lack of internet access, which I will try and fix. Also, sites such as hotmail, gmail, and yahoo mail are blocked from work by SuperScout Web Filter- does anyone know any ways around this? Until I get things worked out, the best way to reach me is via my cosmicbuddha email account, or posting here. Gotta get back to work…

As usual, things are not going as expected. I was able to hold the attention of my smaller classes of 20 yesterday with a lesson about Bob Marley and Jamaican history, and I even got the students to sing along. I don’t think I can do this the same way in a larger class, but I will give it a shot tomorrow.
Classes are very challenging to plan here. The teachers want me to make “interesting” lesson plans for kids that have a very low proficiency and an even lower level of interest in English. Their idea of fun are “worksheets that the kids can do by themselves” because “they don’t listen and can’t work in groups”. They also have no set curriculum, which is good for creative license but drastically increases my workload, and the teachers have no time or interest to co-plan lessons. I’m going to try some games in the classes in which the kids seem to be paying attention, and I guess try and find a good set of worksheets to pass out when it is impossible to make myself heard. Any suggestions for pre-made materials that I can use?
As for the “worst class”- they seem to be a pretty cool class. Sure, the kids may not like English at all, but I seem to have connected with them pretty well. The “worst kids” are the ones who say hello and even kind of pay attention. It is going to be challenging to hold their interest, but at least I have the momentum to start with. Make no mistake- many of the kids in this class are reading comics or magazines, checking their mobile phones, drawing, sleeping, and talking, but they are relatively good kids. If I could have taught them from shogakko, I think these same kids would have turned out a lot different, as to their negative views toward English.
I think I found a way to make the time pass by more quickly. Every time I give the class a worksheet to fill out, I’m going to be playing music. Maybe I’ll take five minutes each class to introduce an artist that they’ve never heard before, and teach them the genre, country, or any other interesting materials. If nothing else, the music will make the time go by more quickly.
So that’s it. There will be no team teaching here, just my one man show. Hopefully I can step up to the challenge. At the end of the year, if the students show an interest in foreign cultures and people, and if they develop a wider interest in music because of what I play in class I will be content.

It looks like I’m going to have to adjust my teaching style to a lower level. Most of the kids are at a lower level than the elementary school students I taught, so that means that some of the activities that I already have made up are too advanced. That being said, the kids are not all psychotic as I had feared.
I got some advice from the cool jaded Japanese teacher today. She said that if I see students sleeping in class, just let them sleep. If they’re reading manga, let them read manga. If that’s the way that the teachers at my high school (who don’t have huge burning ulcers) run their classes, then that’s the way I will teach as well.
Maybe I’ll just call it English class, but turn it into something different. With this group I think the emphasis on the lessons should be on cultural matters, and follow what the students are interested in, with English playing a secondary role.
Just out of curiosity, I asked that cool teacher “Why should I let the students sleep?”. She said “They will start being rude, cause interuptions, and may become violent!”. Kids these days need their sleep anyways. Hell, maybe I’ll designate 30 minutes of each class for “Special English Nap/Study Time” and join in the fun.