Hot Pockets

In Japan people buy boxes of these little chemical-filled heat packs that go in your pockets and in your shoes and on your backs underneath your shirt (they come in adhesive appliqué or as little baggies). Today the school’s special needs teacher, Maki sensei, asked me if we use these heat-packs in other countries. A better question is, Why do they use them in Japan? The answer to that one is that it is freezing cold inside schools and homes in Japan for about five or six months of the year. This is most pronounced in schools, which are horribly cold all winter long. But Maki sensei and I start to talk about this, and it ends up being a really nice conversation. We talk about building styles and school uniforms, and also the way that effecting new changes works in Japan vs other countries, and about how, from an outsider’s perspective, the strictness of the system here seems only cruel and unreasonable even if it seems like “just the way you do things" from the inside. (If you need an example of “cruel and unreasonable strictness,” girls here are required to wear skirts all year round, even if it’s a 15 below 0-degrees with a 20-degree windchill and hail. I am not exaggerating.) But I said that if Maki sensei were teaching in America, she would surely spy out a million crazinesses that escape the average American.

It was really neat having this as a “good conversation” instead of a “rant about Japan.” It was also neat being listened to and talking to someone on the inside, and getting to use all these new words I’ve learned. I’ve been studying with the JET language correspondence course, and I really have learned a lot, even in only the first month. I got to use all kinds of new words, like “progress” and “mail” and “call for” and “compliment” and a bunch more, and I got to use new tenses for giving and receiving actions and things; it was so cool! I even had to think back to the dialogues in the textbook and be like, “what was that expression that Pochi the Puppy’s father kept using? That's what I want to say right now.” It was really awesome—studying totally rocks. Every day I study, my skills get a little tighter and their base a little broader, and everything gets a little easier to use. Go, studying! ROCK ON STUDYING! WOO!