Archive for May, 2006

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I have changed the layout of the site.  Hope you like it better than the last one!

Parking Crackdown!

The Yomiuri Shinbun reports that a law regarding illegal parking will go into effect soon:

With the revision of the Road Traffic Law, enforcement of parking regulations will be drastically changed from June 1.

Under the revised law, police will be allowed to outsource enforcement of parking laws to the private sector, and 270 police stations, or more than 20 percent of the police stations nationwide, plan to delegate all or some of their parking related tasks to the private sector.

Gaijin drivers beware!   Gone are the days of parking anywhere you want, with the worst penalty being a polite note on your windshield asking you to please not park there in the future.  You might actually get parking tickets now!

Samurai Panda

Here’s an amazing Japanese commercial I came across the other day:

Learning to hate

OhmyNews reporter Tony Andriotis has recently posted his second article on Japanese-Korean relations, entitled “Learning to Hate: Revisited“. It is a really excellent article about the ridiculous anti-Japanese hatred that seems to be common among Koreans these days.

Recently, I have been teaching a conversation class for high school aged recent immigrants to the United States. Over the past few months I have become accustomed to many a conversation dealing with the evils of Apolo Ohno and Ichiro Suzuki. I have heard almost every “the world (and specifically, America) is out to get us” conspiracy theory being dished out in the Korean blogosphere. (By the way, this is another thing I have found that Korea and Greece have in common. Many a Greek seems to think that President Bush wakes up every morning plotting the best ways to challenge Greece and its proud population of 10 million souls). I actually welcome those conversations. Honestly, they are fun.

However, several of my students recently asked me about how much damage could be inflicted on Japan, if North Korea were to “nuke” it. Rather shocked, I responded, “Lots.” To that I heard, “Yeah, but how many people would die.” I then told them that the problem with a nuclear bomb is that people can die from it even 50 or 60 years later. I specifically pointed out that there are people dying in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today as a result of the bombing half a century ago. To this, one student responded, “Good.”

The very next week, another student again asked about the nightmare scenario of “Japan getting nuked by North Korea.” I put my arms up and I said, “What is your problem with Japan? What have they done to you in the last 60 years?” He smiled and said, “Dokdo.” And to that, all I can honestly do is pray that with age comes wisdom, and with wisdom comes peace.

Read Tony Adriotis’ articles:
Learning to Hate, Teaching to Forget
Learning to Hate: Revisited

“Learn first, then study English”

There’s a pretty interesting editorial on Japan’s English education system in the Japan Times. Apparently some Japanese don’t agree with the recent decision to begin compulsory English lessons in Elementary school:

“I am not saying the Japanese shouldn’t learn English, and I grant that English is indispensable if we are to make a place for ourselves in the global society,” he writes. It does not necessarily follow, though, that Japanese schools are in a position to teach English effectively. If, as he believes, they are not, lowering the age at which bad English is taught to children risks doing more harm than good.

Problem No. 1: Where will the native-speaking assistant language teachers the ministry plan envisions come from? There are some 23,000 elementary schools nationwide. You’d need a small army of teaching assistants. Who would fill the ranks, Ochiai demands — foreign backpackers hanging out in Tokyo’s Roppongi district? Unquestionably many of them are native English speakers, but few are qualified teachers, and to put children in the hands of nonteachers would be sowing seeds for future trouble.

From unqualified teachers, the kids might pick up colloquial expressions and casual conversation — the sort of repertoire that “will get you invited to parties to be the target of jokes you don’t understand,” as Ochiai puts it, while doing little, he feels, to advance the nation’s globalization.

A second problem hinges on what advocates of early language instruction often regard as a fact in their favor: The younger the child, the more easily he or she soaks up foreign languages. Ochiai turns the argument on its head. The younger the children, he fears, the more readily they’ll absorb bad English, and the more indelibly it will stick to them later in life.

Basic education, as Ochiai sees it, is best acquired in one’s own language: “Japanese who can’t read Sapio properly in Japanese aren’t going to get much out of Newsweek in English.”

Nor will they have much to say to foreigners. “If you can speak English, you can speak to a billion people,” hypes a private English school commercial quoted by Ochiai. Actually, he shrugs, the true figure is 3 billion — “but ask yourself: Do you really have anything to say that will be of interest to so many people?”

I think Mr. Ochiai is slightly off his mark. Certainly there are a great deal of foreigners without teaching certificates teaching English to kids in Japan(myself included). It would be a great thing if the Japanese could find foreigners with teaching licenses, but given the fact that many western countries are having great difficultly finding teachers for their own schools, it is unlikely that many qualified foreign teachers would pack up their bags and move to Japan to be an ALT at 250,000 yen a month for the rest of their lives. And even if a foreigner had teaching qualifications in their own country, they would have a hard time passing Japanese teaching certification exams, which test teachers on a wide variety of non-ESL subjects. But is the real problem a lack of qualified foreign English teachers?

I’ve met a lot of Japanese teachers of English. A lot of them were really nice people and some of them were very good at English. However, the vast majority of them sucked at English. They could not say more than 3 sentences in English without making a major grammatical error. Mr. Ochiai believes that it must be dirty foreign backpackers who are teaching bad English to Japanese kids. He obviously knows nothing about Japan teachers’ English ability. If the Japanese government insisted on only hiring Japanese English teachers who could actually speak/read English, there would be no need for foreign ALTs.

I’m guessing that Japan’s English education system will remain pointless and broken for the time being, allowing thousands of foreign backpackers to get paid 250,00 yen a month to act as assistant language teachers(human tape players). But it doesn’t really matter anyway. There are 3 billion English speakers out there. What could you possibly say that would interest that many people?

Maid Cafe in Hiroshima

Apparently maid cafes aren’t just a Tokyo thing anymore.  A maid cafe that recently opened in Hiroshima seems be doing pretty well the with the local otaku!