October 31, 2002 - 10:15 PM
Wes Ehrlichman

So I lied about putting the pictures up to go along with my last entry. In my defense I am an incredibly busy guy. Every week my only free days are Monday and Tuesday.

Wednesdays I have Japanese Class in Sendai, which is about 45 minutes away,
Thursdays I have an English Conversation Club from 7:00 to 9:00 at the Social Education Center,
Fridays I have Badminton at the school gym from 7:00 to whenever,
and weekends I like to either rest or take advantage of being in Japan.

I did subtly update the page though over the weekend. The "Boards" link above works now. Click on it and join the fun!

This weekend is a long weekend and I'm going to Nagoya to visit Christina. When I get back from this trip I'm sure I'm going to have new experiences to share but I wanted to make sure that you guys didn't miss today's amazingly humorous pictures. For you see, today is Halloween and I'm going to use this day to drop some pictures of my school and tell you what I did today. Don't skip ahead just yet though, first some explanation.

Japanese people have no idea what Halloween is, so today was a lot of fun. I got to paint a picture of Halloween in everyone's mind. I'm pretty sure the end result is that they all think everyone gets off of school to watch scary movies, ask people for candy and beat them up if it's not given to them, and go to dance costume partys with a strange apple ritual. It doesn't help that the worksheet I had been handing out the whole time said that people carry Jack-o-lanterns around the neighborhood when they go trick or treating. Doh! I didn't find this out until the English teacher said something to me about it during the final Halloween class of the day. That's what I get for not understanding Japanese! Oh well, I'm pretty sure they at least got the gist of what Halloween is.

Oh yeah, and the whole time I was in this costume:

How sweet is that! The afro stands up because a giant inflatable innertube on the inside. I'm totally serious. I also brought in a few wigs that one of the teachers had lying around for the kids to wear. So they flung wigs around the room the whole time and by the end of the class everyone had rainbow colored wig hair in their real hair. It was a good time.

My activities for Halloween were different depending on what grade I was teaching. At the elementary school we sang "One Little, Two Little, Three Little Witches" (hey it's less offensive than Indians), and we either played Halloween Bingo or made Halloween Cards depending on how much work the real teacher wanted to do. Two classes made cards and they ended up really really good. The teacher for one of the classes even made a costume for one of the kids.

The fun activity was the making of the cards though. I taught them no usable English (except for maybe "bag"), but at least they will now be able to point out when something is meant to be a Halloween decoration.

The Process

The Product 3rd Year

The Product 4th Year

The Junior High School was a different story. We didn't have any construction paper, but they understand a lot more English so we had to make do with Jack-o-Lantern hang man, Halloween-word Bingo, a Halloween-word word search, and Halloween Question Time.

We did the Question Time at the beginning, and this was where I could tell if the class was going to be into it or not. We came into the class with our costumes on and they went nuts every time, which is what I expected. Then I would ask what the kids why we were dressed up. Before word got around that today was a fun Halloween class people were either totally unresponsive or totally wrong. The wrong ones were by far the best.

The most surprising thing that they didn't know was the answer to "What do kids say when they get candy?" At least a few of these answers were Unintelligable Japanese (according to the English teacher), but most every class would eventually come up with "Give me candy!" which I guess sounds about right to someone who knows nothing about Halloween. Can you imagine if we just went around to people's houses and said, "give me candy!" I guess trick or treat isn't any better if you think about the meaning though...

Alright here's the pictoral.

Oh the nutty kids...

I can't think of a better way to do teacher introductions than in a humongous inflatable afro. So here you go:

This is Mrs. Kume, the English teacher that I work with every day. I'm sure I've talked about her before.

Here is Mr. Tateoka, who is one of the funniest guys here. I teach at least two of his kids too.

Mr. Sasaki here is an interim math teacher because the usual math teacher had a baby. He's a little older than me, and he's also unbelievably cool.

The kids favorite, and one of mine as well; Mrs. Tanimura is unbelievably kind.

Mr. Hamada is a really fun guy. We exchange a little bit of vocabulary almost every day. The other day I taught him "Hangover."

The guy on the right is Mr. Yoshikuni and the guy on the left teaches a class that I don't teach in. He seems like a great guy though from the few times I've met him.

And for my parting shot, here is the picture of a kid in the costume I mentioned above. The teacher made it during class using just a trash bag, a pair of scissors, and a few pieces of scotch tape:

So it looks like by the end of class they had some kind of idea about what Halloween's about.