Every day I sat at my somewhat-cluttered work desk, I sat next to the gentlest gentlemen I had ever met. He always marched to his desk gripping a black briefcase. When he reached the desk, he’d say cheerfully as if the first greeting in the morning would chase away those dreadful Monday blues, “Good morning!” If he were late, marching into the teacher’s room with his briefcase and huff on his breath, he’d still get out a cheerful, “Good morning!” before tossing his stuff onto his desk and jogging to the meeting room. It didn’t take long for us to become good friends. He was curious about everything and everyone in the same way children asked, “Where do babies come from?” I wanted to laugh and answer as honestly as possible.
The one thing I loved about sitting next to this teacher was the way he spoke. He had a soft voice, and whenever I taught him a new English word, he would weigh the word with his tongue, sounding each syllable out and rolling it around in his mouth. By the time he committed the word to memory, I’d sense his pride in the new vocabulary, and I’d find myself wanting to teach him more words. In exchange, he taught me Japanese, correcting my clumsy sentences and checking my worksheets. He was usually the first person to tell me what was going on, even before my coordinators.
What surprised me the most about him was his devotion to his family. Before returning to teaching, he was essentially a house husband, making meals for his daughter and wife, cleaning the home, and taking care of his child. “I went to a cooking school to make better lunches,” he told me one day. “But I had to learn the cooking words first.” After this admission, I respected him more. As gentle as he seemed, this man did things with resolve, something that many young people didn’t do nowadays.
Soon, I brought my homemade lunches and bagels and healthy sweets with me for him to try. He told me honestly what he liked the most about each item and what I could do to make them better. None of his words discouraged me, only made me smile even if the criticism wasn’t positive. One day, I brought him an oatmeal muffin, and he shyly admitted, “I’ve never had oatmeal. Is it good?” I think my eyebrows lifted to the ceiling because he laughed. “Is that strange?”
“OK, wait right here.” I went to the fridge, put an oatmeal muffin on a paper plate, and warmed it up in the microwave. I watched him eat it slowly, eating in the same way he learned new English words. He took a small bite, chewed it carefully, and this time, his eyebrows went up.
“Mmm, it’s good!” And he went on to finish the rest of the oatmeal muffin with gusto. What I realized about him was that he lacked any concept of ill intentions. Most people I met, they had some desire to be cutthroat, to be uncaring, to be superior to someone else, but not this man. He simply accepted everyone and everything, and if he needed something to happen, he made sure to make it happen in the simplest way possible. He was a man of zero drama.
And when it was one of my last times to sit next to him, he looked at me and asked, “Did you eat lunch?” I told I hadn’t, and he invited me to lunch. I was ecstatic. In the last two weeks of leaving Japan, I had forgotten when to eat, abandoning food for drives to different towns and post offices to mail boxes. I think he saw my body shrink and my energy diminish under the weight of work, and as a good older brother or cousin or father would do, help me regain at least one meal of normality.
So we went to eat Chinese food at a small but clean restaurant near the school where customers took off their shoes next to tatami mats and traditional floor tables. I learned that being away from school and the prying eyes and ears of the staff and students let me and my companion be ourselves. After eating the lunch special, we started telling each other stories. “When I was leaving America,” I told him over a cup of coffee, “some guys told me they liked me. I thought, ‘Why are you telling me now?’ And that’s how I got closer to my husband. He said, ‘If you weren’t going to Japan, I’d ask you to be my girlfriend.’ I was really happy, but nothing was going to stop me from going to Japan. It was my dream, you know?”
Watching his black eyes light up behind his glasses always made me want to say everything I thought. It was one of the reasons why, despite being the gentlest person in my lifetime, he was also the most dangerous. I wanted to say everything I felt at the moment my husband confessed to me, how happy yet unsure I felt about actually leaving the States, how uncertain my future felt without an anchor holding my old habits together. I kept that part out, let my tongue say the tip of my mind, and told him a funny story about a guy who wanted a date to be a date. He, in turn, told me a similar story, his spanning from mainland Okinawa to his time in Miyako, a popular outer islander with an Okinawan dialect completely different from Okinawan dialect.
When we went back to the office, the shells of ourselves folded over us, and we returned to being working neighbors. While I remembered everyone in my English department as people filled with personality, I felt that my neighbor and I fit together as desk partners in our somewhat-cluttered work area.
Blue, red, and white happi coats moved through the crowd with “festival ” splashed across their backs and brown printed belts cinching their waists. The bodies inside them sweated and smelled, and the heads perched on the shoulders and necks held smiling faces, yakisoba in their mouths, bandannas around their foreheads. As people walked through Naha City awaiting the start of the big tug of war, their happi coats showed that the festival atmosphere started at home. When the rope, which stretched for three blocks through Naha’s 58 street, was pulled by Okinawans and Americans and cut into strips as good luck charms, the happi coats, the festival bearers, came off at home. Once laundered and pressed, the happi coats must be folded.
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I folded happi coats after an event in Los Angeles. One fold here, a flip there, but the creases were the most important part. I wanted to fold them to be stacked the same length and size. When I tried to fold a happi coat without using its preset crease–“let the coat fall over at the crease”–I was inferred, not so much told since that would be too forward, to follow the folding method as everyone else had done before. The precedence was more important than the practical and stackable look of those coats, the same crease blindly to set a path than the person who wore or folded them.
Creases are made when a fabric submits to an iron, and the iron can make creases anywhere the person handling it feels. Why do some people hold the iron or fold past the creases to make a new pattern? Why not make changes instead of submitting to the creases everyone else has made?
While happi coats on bodies are uniforms for festivals and tugs of wars, their creases are traps for those who don’t want to be uniform.
When the ninth box from Japan arrived at my in-laws’ home, I knew that my lengthy adventures there were done. It was as if closure had filled them to remind me, “You’ve given up that life. Accept it.” How can I accept it? part of me challenges with a hint of stubbornness. Even now, I still feel displaced. My eyes look out at a lake from my past and sees it as mysterious, views the surrounding houses and cars as strangers, and finally, the dread of being on the outside fills my stomach. I open each box to forget that ache. Each box had books, comics, clothes, and knick knacks accumulated from 5 years, some pieces broken but fixable, and smells from Japan. I opened a Starbucks mug and sniffed its inside. With a quizzical look, I held it out to my brother in law. “This is what Japan smells like.” It had a woodsy odor, something akin to cut tree slabs that had been perched on someone’s porch for several years.
Everything in southern Okinawa emitted earthy scents. On a summer day, farmers would burn their rotted excess sugar cane, and the smell of smoke and smoldering fritters would fill the air, usually causing my husband’s nose to clog with allergies. My nose, which I soon found to be sensitive to smells, picked up the faint smells of smoke before I saw them. Between March and May, the clouds carried heavy rain into the region, and my nose picked up the vague smell of earth. For me, dirt filled my nose, and with am exhale, I knew to grab an umbrella on the way out the door. On hot summer days, the heat offered me a new scent–the smell of smoldering tar and a stifling, thick air that said it would not leave this small island until the chilled winter air blew in. All the plants bent and wilted underneath the heat’s reign, indicating that my chiffon clothing wouldn’t be enough to shield me from the penetrating summer day. When the wind changed and Okinawans dawned sweaters, long sleeves, and corduroys, the island smells brought me back to my San Diego home and my Norfolk upbringing and the York house where my grandparents lived—crisp air with the distant aroma of Chrstimas-time pine, warmed breaths challenging white clouds and freezing hands, apple cider and vanilla bean perfumed on knits and wools and blankets.
“What’re those boxes?” a friend’s little boys asked me, and I opened the box for them to look in. For them, they saw lots of dirty notebooks, pictures of Japanese kids, and messages scribbled in an indecipherable language. I showed them the things there, but I held my tongue on everything else. No matter how I tried to explain each memory and each smell to them, they wouldn’t get it either. They were mine.
How to Teach English for Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs)
In Japan, native English speakers are seen as effective English teachers, but in most cases, new Assistant Language Teachers, or ALTs, find that being a native speaker doesn’t automatically qualify them as English teachers. Just as teachers in English-speaking countries need to earn a degree or certificate to teach English as a Foreign Language, or EFL, ALTs also need to know how to teach English.
Still, ALTs in Japan will not spend over $200 or 120 hours of EFL training on becoming better teachers. Even murky pedagogy books and online texts are daunting for ALTs looking for the quick fix. Good thing that there’s this little guide for curious (and uncertified) ALTs.
What are my students’ language levels?
“My kids are junior high school students, so they’re intermediate level.” Any seasoned, certificate-holding teacher would shake their heads at that statement. In any language, students are put into different levels of English by how much English they know, not their grade levels. Many of my senior high school students were beginners even after 6 years of English study.
How do you determine the language level of your students? If you’ve already done a few classes but you’re still uncertain about your students’ language abilities, look at the list below, keeping in mind some of your students’ mistakes and problems in English.
Beginners level: If learners were blank slates with a few illegible words scrawled across the surface, these slates would be beginners. They have zero to little English knowledge.
Elementary level: These learners can make sentences on their slates, but only on really easy things such as nouns (i.e. cat, dog, baseball) and simple verbs (i.e. play, walk, run).
Low/pre-intermediate level: Students at this level can say what’s on their slates and understand what’s on the slate sometimes, but they need an eraser in their hand at all times. Even with basic sentence structures, they will make lots of mistakes.
Intermediate level: These learners can say and understand what’s on the slate sometimes, even if there are some more in-depth ideas. Still, they need the eraser, but they aren’t as dependent on it. They can make sentences on their own such as “I can speak English fluently.”)
Upper intermediate level: Students here can communicate what’s on the slate without looking at it, but there are a few mistakes that need to be fixed. They are able to say, “I saw teacher at McDonald’s yesterday,” though they will forget the “the” or “my” before “teacher”.
Advanced level: Learners don’t need a slate or an easy-to-grab eraser anymore. They are fluent enough to speak and/or write in English without making many errors (“Unit 1: Teachers and Learners” 7).
You can also gauge students through questions to Japanese teachers by showing them English sentences and asking, “Can the students make these sentences on their own?” A sympathetic “no” or a gleeful “yes” will help you identify your students’ language level.
After you find your students’ language level, you can uncover worksheets and activities that better fit your students and your lesson plans. Some EFL websites such as iSLCollective.com and ESL Games World.com use these language levels to separate worksheets and games with the same target grammar.
How do I plan a lesson?
Whether you’re writing down a plan (which you should for later reference) or you’re thinking it, lesson planning is a crucial part of teaching in any subject. In EFL, it is the brain of English class—without it, you, your co-teacher, and your students will be wondering what everyone is doing in class.
In planning an EFL lesson, there are teaching patterns to make the class flow smoothly from learning and practicing to producing the target English. First, there are 3 stages for teaching EFL. The first stage is the Engage Stage, which is an introduction of the target English through skits, clips, items, role-plays or pictures. For example, you and your co-teacher may perform a skit for introduction phrases such as “Where are you from?” This stage is a way to get students interested in the target English and expose them to how the actual English can be used in real time. If the students are learning grammar, utilize the Engage Stage to do quick games that practice words they will use later.
The second stage is the Study Stage where the target English is formally taught. JET Program ALTs won’t be responsible for this area as stated in the JET Program Handbook, but private ALTs and elementary school ALTs will face this task regardless of their contracts. In teaching English grammar, build off of the Engage Stage words or games. For example, if students know nouns (i.e. cat) and simple verbs (i.e. jump), they can learn auxiliary verbs (i.e. The cat can jump). This is also the best place to predict students’ mistakes (i.e. The cat can jumping). Make sure to point out the differences between an incorrect sentence and a correct sentence.
The final stage is the Activate Stage, which is for practicing and producing the target English. Here is where students should interview or use the target with each other. In most cases, this is also where students produce the target, so it is very important to clearly explain the activity, do examples, and ask Instruction Check Questions, or ICQ’s (“Do you understand?” is not a good ICQ. Use, “What’s step one?”) (Burns). Teachers monitor students and their English during the activity. In this stage, if students are making the same mistakes, you should inform your co-teacher about this as they’ll be likely to make these same mistakes in the future.
Using the Engage-Study-Activate format, or sometimes called the Present-Practice-Produce teaching sequence (J. Richards 54), is the most basic way of lesson planning in EFL. There are other teaching patterns, but many Japanese English teachers are familiar with this format, and some may prefer this method.
Does my plan go over the time limit?
Now that you’ve identified your students’ language levels and learned the different stages in EFL, time will be your greatest enemy. “How do I teach everything I want on this grammar in 50 minutes?” Look at your lesson plan and write how long each stage and activity will take in minutes. Take care to include the time to explain, demonstrate, and question each stage or activity.
For example, if you are going to play a spelling game where students race to write an English word correctly, an explanation (“We will play a spelling game. It’s a race.”) and a demonstration (“Mr. Tanaka is Team 1. I am Team 2.”) should take 3 minutes while the example round with students and the real gameplay will take around 8 minutes. Total time for activity is 12 minutes. “Wait, that’s supposed to be 11 minutes.” Always plan an extra minute or two for what I call transition time. Between each stage and activity, there needs to be a little prep time. If students are told to wait for too long, they will drift off, and you and co-teacher will have to try your hardest just to coax them back. On the opposite end of the spectrum, playing a game or doing an activity for too long will bore students. Shoot for 10- to 15-minute activities.
The Study Stage usually takes around 20 minutes, depending on the teacher, so during that lengthy time, walk around and help students. But if you’re an elementary school ALT, you’re more than likely to be the main teacher because the homeroom teachers don’t speak English. Still, the timing applies to these cases—give the repetitive and pictorial Study Stage no more than 20 minutes. No matter what happens in class, be flexible with the time. If you rush or pack too much information in the Study Stage, your students’ brains might explode, making the entire 50 minutes completely useless.
Once you’ve got your lesson plan done, it should look like this:
#
Phase
Timing
Procedure
1
Engage
(Start with words. Students usually know these.)
8 – 10 minutes
Translation Race: Teachers will say a word. One person from each line (team) will put their team’s number on the translated word. (Example: Jd says, “playing” and students must race and put their number on the word “している”).
2
2 minutes
Give worksheet to students. Students will write the words from dictionary form (“run”) to progressive tense (“running”).
3
Study
(Target grammar with words students know.)
8 minutes
Hideaki will explain the grammar and students will fill in the blanks on their worksheets. Jd walks around and helps students. Hideaki will also explain the question form using present progressive tense.
4
7 minutes
Criss Cross: All students will stand up. Teachers will say a sentence using the grammar (Example: Jd says, “I am playing piano” and a student will answer, “私はピアノをしています”). The student who can translate the sentence can sit down.
5
Activate
(Activity using target grammar and words.)
20 minutes
Sugoroku: Jd and Hideaki will explain the activity using gestures and pictures. Students will play rock-paper-scissors (じゃんけん). Winner will ask a question using the grammar point (Example: “Who is flying?”). Loser will find the character and answer, “Anpanman is flying.” The loser will sign the winner’s box. Now the winner can move to the next box.
(When students finish early or when most students are finished with Sugoroku) Funny Animals: Students will take 2 pictures with animals doing human things. They will glue the animals to their paper and make 2 English and Japanese sentences from the pictures.
Leeway Time: 3 minutes
After 3 years of teaching 7 junior high schools and 2 senior high schools, I’ve learned that how long students are sitting is very important. If students sit still for more than 10 minutes, they start to daydream, talk, or the worst, sleep during the class. The best way to combat the sleepy nature in sitting schoolchildren is to make them stand or do mini games during the Study Stage. Sometimes, I do Criss Cross (立ってよこ, or tatte yoko) after the Study Stage to give slower students a chance to catch up and to gauge how well the students on a whole have learned the target English. This and other mini games get the students to their feet as well, breaking the monotony of the lecture teaching style.
After finding the students’ language levels, picking the activities for your lesson plans, and timing each stage, you must ask yourself one more thing: do the games and activities use teacher-to-student interactions or are they student-to-student interactions? In EFL, student-to-student interactions are required—no matter how “shy” or quiet your students seem, they must talk or work with each other using the target English. Interviews, rock-paper-scissors games, and interactive BINGO worksheets will get your students moving around and practicing what they just learned.
Your final lesson plan should look like the following:
PROCEDURE
#
Phase
Timing
Interaction
Teacher
Procedure
1
Engage
(Start with words. Students usually know these.)
8 – 10 minutes
Teacher-Student
ALT and Mr. Tanaka
Translation Race: Teachers will say a word. One person from each line (team) will put their team’s number on the translated word. (Example: Jd says, “playing” and students must race and put their number on the word “している”).
2
2 minutes
Teacher- Student
ALT and Mr. Tanaka
Give worksheet to students. Students will write the words from dictionary form (“run”) to progressive tense (“running”).
3
Study 1
(Target grammar with words students know.)
8 minutes
Teacher-Student
Mr. Tanaka
Hideaki will explain the grammar and students will fill in the blanks on their worksheets. Jd walks around and helps students who aren’t writing.
4
5 minutes
Teacher-Student
ALT (and Mr. Tanaka, if needed)
Criss Cross: All students will stand up. Teachers will say a sentence using the grammar (Example: Jd says, “I am playing piano” and a student will answer, “私はピアノをしています”). The student who can translate the sentence can sit down.
5
Activate 1
(Activity using target grammar and words.)
10 minutes
Student-Student
ALT and Mr. Tanaka
Sugoroku: Jd and Hideaki will explain the activity using gestures and pictures. Students will play rock-paper-scissors (じゃんけん). Winner will ask a question using the grammar point (Example: “Who is flying?”). Loser will find the character and answer, then sign in the box. Now the winner can move forward.
6
Study 2
(Correcting any mistakes.)
10 minutes
Teacher-Student
ALT and Mr. Tanaka
Funny Animals: Students will take 2 pictures with animals doing human things. They will glue the animals to their paper and make 2 English and Japanese sentences from the pictures.
7
Activate 2
(Producing
target grammar)
5 minutes
Student
ALT and Mr. Tanaka
Original Sentence: Students will draw their own picture and write their own sentence in English and Japanese.
Total time: 50 minutes
As mentioned before, the goal of this lesson, as is for all EFL lessons, is for students to produce an original sentence using the target English. But they can’t jump into it—think skydiving without a parachute. They’ll surely crash into a sea of jumbled English. Instead of ending the lesson at the first Activate Stage, insert another Study Stage between the first Activate Stage and the second Activate Stage, easing students into their original sentences with several references to the target English.
In this lesson, I gave each student small pictures of animals doing human-like things (i.e. squirrels with cameras, monkeys studying, cats eating hamburgers), and they made sentences from what they saw in the pictures. Once the teachers and I checked their funny animal sentences, we tell them to make their own sentences. At this point, students have gone from memorized verbs and nouns to a full sentence using those terms. Using different games and activities, they gained confidence in producing the target English in an original sentence.
Now that there is a simplified guide for teaching EFL, ALTs without EFL training or certification will have no excuses in making more effective and memorable lessons in Japan.
Sources
Burns, Lucas. How to Teach English (ESL): The ultimate guide to teaching English as a Second Language. Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 2014. Ebook.
Houghton, Stephanie Ann and Damian J. Rivers. Native-Speakerism in Japan: Intergroup Dynamics in Foreign Language Education. Vol.151. Bristol: Multilingual Matters,2013. 168. Print.
International TEFL and TESOL Training. Unit 1: Teachers and Learners. 2011. PDF file.
Richards, Jack C. and Theodore S. Rodgers. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 54. Print.
Japanese businessmen with too many drinks and skewed neckties watch me walk up a block of squat business plazas and timeworn bars, most with red lanterns swinging in their wooden doorways. This is Naha City, the capitol of Okinawa, three hours by plane from Japan’s famous capitol, three decades behind what people would call Japan when Tokyo comes into a conversation. Even the powerlines, which have no intention of migrating underground, provide background noise to the drunken businessmen and the beckoning shop owners in this expensive drinking sector of Naha. The men enter and exit their doors, some stumbling with tomato faces and smiles into waiting taxis.
This is my last night in Okinawa, and I walk next to my best friend, a Japanese soccer player who became my first friend in Okinawa five years ago. We were both teachers, me in the loose sense as an Assistant Language Teacher and him as my coordinator who spoke fluent English with a New Zealand flare. Though he left English teaching a few months later, we remained brother and sister in the islander sense, and whenever we saw each other’s family members at the mall, we were meeting another relative, an extended vein from our friendship.
Now, even after five years, I notice Japanese men trying to pry me from my place next to him—seeing a tall Japanese man in a casual shirt and chinos next to a black woman walking in this area is rare, unless this American and hondoujin are lost. This is our area, our yen is better here. Your yen is better over there where you turned off International Street. At those guys, I make eye contact, and they quickly turn their eyes elsewhere. Wherever yen was going to be spent, tonight was my night to let someone else do the spending. I, as a returnee to the States, was not allowed to dirty my own farewell party with my own cash.
My friend leads me to a wooden, four-story business building that looks as tan and old as the other buildings we passed. We go up a flight of wooden stairs and duck under a curtain to enter what my friend calls “my brother’s work”. The shop, a small but clean sushi bar, boasts three tatami areas with traditional floor tables and zabuton, or colorful Japanese cushions. Wooden doors, wooden pillars, and wooden countertops provide the aesthetics rather than hanging paintings or woodblock prints. My friend and I sit at the counter, and from an open doorway with a white curtain, his brother emerges in a white sushi chefs outfit. It is my first time to see him in four years, but through my friend, I always know where he is working. He is shorter than my friend by a head, but his small eyes and humor resemble my friend’s. Before they exchange a handshake, he looks surprised to see me. “Long time no see,” he says with a shy smile. Unlike his brother, he is reserved and gracious in his demeanor.
But it’s my friend who teaches me about the life of being a sushi chef. “Being a sushi chef,” he tells me after we have wiped our hands and cheered over a glass of chuuhai, “takes a lot of training. When we were kids, my brother was always shaping rice with his hands.” Only the best traditional sushi, which consists of a select cut of fish, a dab of wasabi, and a thumb-sized amount of formed rice, could lead sushi chefs into stardom in the industry. “Every day, chefs have to make $500 to $700 a night for the shop owners. Once they make a certain amount of money for the owners, the chefs can move on to owning their businesses.” He is proud of his younger brother, watching him deliberate over the rows of sliced fish in front of us, and in a way, I hold that same pride for this young chef.
The sushi looks different than the usual sushi I used to eat from the market or in a restaurant chain like Hamazushi. The fish are colorful and thick, hearty even, but easy to chew while the hint of wasabi lacks the sharpness of typical sushi, emphasizing the flavors of the fish and the shaped rice as a tasty unit. As I chew the second sushi, I suddenly realize why I feel as if I had skipped something: I did not dip it in soy sauce. It is completely unneeded.
My friend’s brother places sushi after sushi in front of us, lapsing into English for the fishes’ names and joking in Japanese with my friend. We get another drink, and it starts to wash away my senses. I laugh a little too hard, smile a little too much, eat the delicious handcrafted sushi a little too fast. I want to remember the warm feeling that both the chuuhai and Okinawa had given me for five years. People here are warm, and even those with cold interiors have no choice but to obey Japanese etiquette. When Okinawan people speak to me, it feels as if I’ve come home after a long absence, and they’re gently easing me into what I forgotten. Five years ago, I was surprised by this feeling, and every year, I renewed my contract to get closer to it, something akin to my Filipino home in the States. Other colleagues remarked their envy when I admitted I hardly felt homesick in years.
Between the second drinks and red snapper sushi, three Japanese people sit at the bar next to me. Immediately, one of the drunk women says, “You look like a famous singer.” For a while, everyone’s stumped. It’s when our last sushi arrives that the lady announces, “Diana Ross!” For the remaining twenty minutes there, she and her two friends address me as the former Supreme vocalist until my friend bids his brother goodnight and pays the bill.
“Goodbye, Diana Ross!” the three drunk birds say before we disappear down the stairs and into the warm summer streets. Now less business suits haunt the plaza doorways, and the taxis line the curbs. This is their time to strip drunken workers of their last yen. We avoid them and walk to a close-by Family Mart to get some cheap alcohol. At 2 o’clock in the morning, the clerk looks at us with an eyebrow quirked above his glasses. “There might by a typhoon tomorrow,” it says, but his thin lips only utter, “259 yen.”
When we get outside, the wind has picked up, flinging lose plastic bags and what little trash adorn the entire city towards the south. My friend and I cheer and drink our alcohol. As the night grows cooler and windier, our conversation—his kids, my husband, our jobs, five years of being an American sister and a Japanese Okinawan brother—turns into something warmer and sadder. Tonight, I think, let’s drink and eat before it gets too sad. As the lights in some stores dim and metallic doors slide over their shops, my friend and I stand up and smile at each other.
My last night allows me to return to a pair of eyes that can see Okinawa’s beautiful islands, see its people in their chinos and suits, and appreciate looking at all of them together in one place.
So I went to Japan 5 years ago to escape the American recession and lifestyle as well as my mother and live out my dream of working in Japan. Now that my 5 years are up and I’m back in the States, life should be better…But there are tons of things people didn’t warn me about when it came to re-adjusting to my home country.
The Constant Stomachaches. In Japan, I became a vegetarian (from July 2014), and since my husband returned to the U.S. first, I could adjust my diet every month to a lifestyle teetering on veganism. I eliminated most salts, refined sugars, and fats from my food by planning, measuring, and cooking every meal, and in 4 months, I lost around 33 pounds (15 kg). The return to America cost me dearly–in a week, I gained 10 pounds (4.5 kg). Everything I eat, even without meat, makes my stomach flip upside down. And it doesn’t help that my husband isn’t considerate of my new eating lifestyle because he isn’t vegetarian. Maybe part of my stomachaches are from stress.
The Wonderful “Gaijin-ism”. Where I lived in Japan, there were few gaijin, or foreigners. When I did see a foreigner, my first thought was, “Gaijin!” That’s how few and rare foreigners are in Japan save for the heavily-populated cities. Back in the U.S., I had to stop myself from being surprised by “foreigners”. Everyone, including myself, aren’t foreigners, so I’m in the middle of re-training my brain to think, “People!”
The Unemployed and Dependent Adult. I had a job and an apartment in Japan for 5 years. Now I’ve got job history and a former apartment that’s already passed to my successor, but no employment or space of my own. I have to depend on my husband’s family before I can look to getting a place, and the job hunt for something I actually want–a position in the writing industry–still makes me ask for help from my in-laws. I’m suddenly a dependent, and it makes me feel small and unreliable. I thought being in Japan would make me more independent, but in returning to America, I find myself in a worse situation than before I left the country.
The Unhomely Home. I got no warning about coming home when you’re not really home. The U.S. doesn’t feel familiar to me anymore. I look at the people and the stores and the houses, and I just think, “I want to go home.” My Okinawan apartment and the places I frequented there pops up in my head, and suddenly I’m finding home to be a far away place in my memories. Part of this foreign feeling comes from my immediate family leaving California. I can’t see my mom or brothers, and it really makes me sad. With the ensuing stomachaches and uncomfortable lifestyle, I just want something familiar, something normal, and that was my family. When I want to eat my mom’s soup because I have stomach pains or I want to laugh with my brothers, I can’t.
The Lost Relationship(s). What kills me is the one thing I’ve left behind: missing someone. I made many friends in Okinawa, and even though I’ve said in past posts that Japanese people are hard to accept foreigners, the friends I made accepted enough of me to let me into beautiful and loving relationships. I just knew that when I got on the plane, I’d never know if I’d see them again. Sure, there’s email, but it’s not the same as facing them at a table in Mr. Donuts or Spicy Kitchen and saying, “How’s it going?” Craving someone’s words or smiles or stories makes me feel as if I’ve lost something really precious in my life.
Today marks the day my blog alias, Machine’s Life, started on WordPress–and WordPress was kind enough to remind me that such a name is dead.
But Jade’s Escape lives on, and when its anniversary comes around, I’ll make my own achievement for everyone. Maybe there’s another contest around the corner.
Along with this good news, I do have an announcement: I’m moving from Japan back to the U.S. in August, so I’ll be busy with preparations. Trust me, it’s no joke! When I get the chance, I’ll write what living in the Japan means to me and how visiting will benefit Japan fans every where.
When you first started drawing manga, did you grab a few sheets from the printer stack? I know I did. Tsk, and a tsk. We didn’t know better then, but now we do. The type of paper you use to create your manga and comics makes a difference in line quality, erasings, and marker bleeds. Manga paper is nothing more than comic book or manuscript paper that’s thicker and more absorbent than regular printer paper. They can be expensive, but here’s a list from online retailers who’ll give you a deal.
The winner of this giveaway is Coco from freelance manga editor/letterer, Coco, who will get a pack of traditional screentones from Japan.
Check out Coco’s website on her lettering and editing adventures at cgcornett.net or her Twitter @cgcornett.
Here is last year’s screentone giveaway winner!
The winner of the 2014 Free Screentone Giveaway was SYS, an Indonesian manga artist of Sang Sayur (The Edibles). She not only claims several packs of screentones but an Attack on Titanpuccho, or soft chew, candy (only in Japan) and a few other treats that’re only in Japan.
Want to win stuff straight from Japan? Look for the next contest announcement in Jade’s Escape’s posts!
“The ultimate sacrifice” is a common trope in comics and anime–and we always fall for it. Why do supreme sacrifices always work? When I think about the supreme sacrifice, I think about death. Life is the one thing that people, animals, and living organisms all grip with tremendous force. Some manga illustrate this point very well.
In Fullmetal Alchemist, youngsters Edward and Alphonse try to resurrect their dead mother through alchemy, a type of scientific sorcery where people can shape matter by trading something with equal materialistic value. In the Elric brothers’ case, Edward’s arm and leg and Alphonse’s soul are sacrificed for only a dabble into the forbidden arts, forcing them to search for the Philosopher’s Stone, a powerful catalyst that may help them get their original bodies back. On their journeys, they face the State Military of Amestris because of their youth and illegal activities, a vengeful Ishbalan war survivor, and humanistic creatures called homunculi. For Edward and Alphonse, they taste death in every adventure, but their true strength comes in wanting to survive. Besides their bodies, the brothers give up their childhood, spare time, livelihood, and sanity to get closer to the Philosopher’s Stone.
What makes this series a great example of the supreme sacrifice is that Edward and Alfonso give up so much without actually dying. It takes great courage to live rather than die. Death, at least to me, is so easy compared to living and facing the demons head-on. When a person dies, there is nothing to overcome, nothing left to experience, nothing to do but be dead. They’ve lost their chances to physically change the world. Only the living can push through and keep going. Sure, the memories of the dead also live, but the dead don’t suffer anymore. If anything, memories are something that haunts the living just as the Elric brothers’ remember their time with their mother. To me, the ultimate sacrifice is to survive and face whatever demons–or angels–that come down the line.
The one person in Fullmetal Alchemist who tops the Elric Brothers in the most supreme sacrifice is Izumi Curtis, the teacher to the brothers. After trying to resurrect her stillborn child, some of her organs are taken, causing her to cough up blood and endure incredible pain on a daily basis. For a person to lose their baby, see into the hellish gates of forbidden alchemy, and live with part of your organs is just amazing. Between the grief and the physical pain, Izumi could had said, “I want to die,” but she continued helping the Elrics through the series. In real life, I think few individuals cope with the grief of a child’s death, let alone, losing their bodies and saving the world from Seven Deadly Sins.
Let’s see you do all this alchemy stuff with half your organs. Image credit
What do you think is the supreme sacrifice other than death? What other titles do you think have the best supreme sacrifice?
Want to try your hand at competing with your manga? Try one of the contests below!
YEARLY CONTESTS
Silent Manga Audition (usually around the end of March) – This annual contest gives out the top prizes including $5,000 for the grand prize winner and recognition by current manga creators in Japan. As the title says “silent”, this manga has one definite rule: there should be no dialogue in your manga.
SacAnime Manga Contest (Deadline: Summer 2015) – While SacAnime is an anime convention held in Sacramento each year, they also hold a manga contest with cash prizes.
LIMITED CONTESTS
Submit an anime-styled T-shirt design between November 23 and December 14, 2015 for a chance at $1000!
Threadless (Deadline: December 14, 2015) – Threadless, one of the top interactive T-shirt retailers, has an anime-themed T-shirt contest. If you win, you can get up to $1000 prize money. For those who submit but don’t win the contest can still get their designs sold on Threadless alongside $7 store credit.
Here’s a poll for all manga creators and dabblers:
Why’s this here? What you ask for may be what you get! Please look at “To Manga Artists” to see the screentones, pens, deals, online courses, and communities dedicated to manga and comic book artists.
