Moving house and takyubin

Moving house in Japan happens a lot around the end of March, beginning of April time. There are university students moving out, teachers moving to new places and, of course, many hundreds of ALTs moving around. The normal way of moving a family, of course, is to hire a van or movers to do it for you – no real difference there.

However, for someone like myself, who only had a few boxes of stuff I wanted to shift, I used a takyubin service. These are delivery services, used much like EMS or FedEx, except they do everything from special delivery papers to full on large boxes and storage. I actually used the post office’s Yu-Pack service, which charges by a combination of size of box and distance, as long as the box is under 30kg, the largest size they have available being one where the three dimensions of the box add up to 1.7metres.

I was moving a pretty good distance (Kagawa prefecture to Ibaraki prefecture) and it cost me about 3000yen to ship my large suitcase across that distance – yes, they ship bags and suitcases too! Many Japanese people use these services to send their luggage to their hotels or home from holiday because the Japanese public transport system doesn’t have much space for luggage.

How to:

1. Pack your stuff. You can buy special boxes from them, but the post office doesn’t really care what you use to package your stuff.

2. Fill out a form! There are two Yu-Pack forms. One is blue, and means that you pay up front. The other is pink and means payment on delivery. The sections are on the left From address/name/tel. no and To address/name/tel. no. The only bit on the right you need to fill in are what time slot you want them to deliver (morning, 12-2pm, 2-4pm, 4-6pm, 6-8pm, after 8pm), and what the contents are (books, toys, kitchen utensils).

3. Take your parcel to the post office! Actually, they do pick up too, but you need to inform them beforehand obviously. I just drove everything to the post office, they lent me a trolley and we lugged my boxes in.

4. Pay.

And unlike what we might expect for deliveries, these will take one or two days at most!

The nuances of Japanese formalwear

There are a few major events in the school year where all the teachers smarten up and put on formal wear. The first was the Opening ceremony in April. I turned up in a dark grey skirt suit and white shirt – no other female teacher was wearing a skirt. O…kay. I made a mental note to wear trousers with my suit for the Closing ceremony at the end of the year.

Big observation days. There are some observation days that the school takes very seriously, and the teachers will, again, smarten up. This time, I wore a basic black trouser suit with a pinstripe shirt. Apparently, only the male teachers got dressed up in suits; all the female teachers stayed in smart casual with a cardigan or sweater teamed with smart trousers or skirt. O…kay. Confused again. I took the jacket off and rooted around for a spare sweater that I’d kept in the car, and slipped that on instead.

Today is the Graduation ceremony! As mentioned before, this happens before the end of the school year, so we still have Closing ceremony next week. I was told to wear black, formal clothes so, again, I turned up in a black trouser suit with a white shirt. All the other female teachers are actually wearing those cloth suits with long skirts and corsages that I thought only middle aged women wear at weddings and debutante balls – except they’re all in black, so it must be a really depressing debutante ball. The headmaster is in a three piece with tails and looks like an orchestra conductor.

I am so confused. I’m going to turn up at the closing ceremony in my black pinstripe suit and I bet you it will be out of place again…

Graduation ceremony

Wow, I’ve been a bit lax in updating this.

School graduation is a big thing in Japan. You graduate from elementary school, junior high school and high school. (In England, we only graduate out of uni.) The ceremonies are pretty serious, with significant amounts of the week before graduation spent rehearsing for graduation. Graduations are generally a whole week earlier than the normal end of school term for everyone else, which means that they are around now.

Not only does it involve knowing what to do when your name is called, it involves knowing when to bow and for how long; practising standing up quickly and sitting down quickly in unison; practising farewell songs and the national anthem, which foot to step onto the podium with first; speeches; being assigned a place to stand on stage so that you can move directly to it, practising how to walk without making loud noises. I kid you not.

Not only does the graduating class have these rehearsals, but the entire school does too. They also practise farewell speeches, farewell songs (to the graduating class and from the graduating class), standing and sitting quickly and bowing.

The beginning struck me rather like a wedding, as a pair of students would walk painstakingly slowly down the middle aisle with the same foot forward, and then the next pair would start walking when they reached a certain line. The graduation ceremony certainly involves much ceremony, but one thing I notice about Japanese ceremonies that makes the entire affair seem very different from a western one is that it’s a very serious affair. The students are generally expected to keep their faces blank, and certainly not smile.

Language confusion

Note to self: stop saying ‘yeah, yeah’ and nodding. It sounds too much like the Japanese ‘ie, ie’ (no, no) and is sodding confusing.

Japanese dates

Dates in Japan go by the ruling Emperor. It is currently Heisei 25, which means it is the 25th year of the Heisei era/period. When Japanese people write their dates, it goes YY/MM/DD and the YY usually means the current Japanese date. All official paperwork uses Japanese era dates. Don’t write in the Western date format! If I wrote 30th Jan 2012 as 12/01/30, people would be thrown off for a moment and your paperwork would probably get mixed up, since Heisei 12 was thirteen years ago.

Of course, people do recognise the western way of writing dates, but if you want to say 2012, you’d probably be safer using the whole 2012 as opposed to ’12.

Heisei started on 8th Jan 1989 when the old emperor died. 1989 is therefore both Showa 64 and Heisei 1.

The last hundred years are:

• Meiji era (1868-1912)
• Taisho era (1912-1926)
• Showa era (1926-1989)
• Heisei era (1989-current)

Photoblog part 2!

As a follow-up to this post, I’m adding some pictures of what I wear to school in colder weather!

 

Bullying

Bullying is kind of a big thing in Japan. There are a lot of news stories about bullying in schools and about kids who kill themselves over it. You might think that is something relatable worldwide, but there is somehow a different nuance to it over here.

Firstly, the school life of a student is more or less a kid’s whole life in Japan. You spend far more time in school than at home, you see your teachers far more often and you spend much more time with your schoolmates than Western counterparts. It means that teachers are expected to be parent-like with kids and take on the corresponding responsibilities.

Secondly, Japan’s entire culture is about community. It’s about sticking together, helping each other and doing what’s best for everyone around you and not just yourself. In contrast, Western culture is all about myself, doing what’s best for me, trying to come out on top – other people are expected to cope by themselves. Being ostracised somewhere that is all about the group instead of the individual feels different.

Luckily, I work in some pretty good schools in terms of community. When a parent called in to complain that her daughter had mentioned a bit of bullying, Actions Were Taken. The principal called all the teachers back to the staffroom at the end of the nearest period and there was an immediate staff meeting right then and there about it. Staff were told to look out for it, to pay extra attention to said girl, a staff member would discreetly watch that class during breaks and they would have a longer meeting about it at the end of the school day. I was surprised – pleasantly so – because I think it would have been unheard of for a single bullying incident to put the entire staff force on high alert in the UK.

School lunch eating methods!

I’ve done several entries on school lunches and food in general now but I thought I’d add something after today’s menu. Generally, whenever you see a new item, it’s probably best to watch and see how the kids do it. For example, there are packets of sauce sometimes that I generally have no idea where to put. The kids will know though.

Today’s dilemna was prawns. They were unpeeled prawns and usually I peel prawns before eating apart from when they’ve been deep fried enough that the shells are soft. Today, I could tell that the shells were still a little bit crunchy and therefore within my usual Let’s peel these range. But I also know that this was school lunch and kids aren’t supposed to get too messy and I was about 85% sure that we were supposed to eat them whole, tail and all (no heads). Which meant that I had to eat the rest of my food whilst glancing around surreptitiously to wait until the kids started eating theirs so that I would know what we were meant to do with it.

Other examples include: Sometimes you are given a packet of mayonaise to go over the tuna and cucumber and that is generally a sign that you are not supposed to eat the tuna and cucumber as a salad but put it inside your bread to make a sandwich. If you are given jam though, the general consensus is to squirt a bit, eat that bit and then squirt some more. (I usually ignore that and make a sandwich anyway.) Mustard and soy sauce go inside the little tub for natto, which you then stir around and either eat out of the pot or pour onto your rice. Grapes skins are peeled off but kiwi skins are debateably eaten. It’s all terribly confusing at times.

Basically, my point is – if it’s new food, it might be worth waiting to see whether there’s a special way of eating it.

Rising sun~

Random small thing I noticed when I was doing a lesson. If given an outline of a sunny day to colour, western kids will colour the sun yellow. Japanese kids default to red or orange! How interesting is that?! I’ve always wondered about the social construct of colours. I wonder if it’s influenced by the fact that their flag is supposedly a red sun.

Coming of Age day

In Japan, the age where you become an adult is 20. That means that the smoking, driving, voting, etc ages all kicks in at 20. To celebrate, there is the annual Coming Of Age day on the second Monday of every January, which is a national holiday. There will be a party/ceremony at local city halls for anyone who has turned/will turn 20 in that academic year (eg. 1st April – 31st March) and sometimes families will hold parties too.

The youth/adult will traditionally receive new clothes and a haircut although that’s not always true anymore. Women will wear furisode, which is a kimono with particularly long sleeves, and men will either wear a kimono or a suit. Since it’s difficult dressing yourself in the full traditional dress without help, a lot of girls will go to a salon to get dressed and styled for the day.