walking jikoshokai with shogakusei

another video of my so-cute-it-hurts shogakusei and my friend, Emily, on our way to make Japanese sweets on an outing to Matsue organized by the Taisha town council.

Enjoy!
-Jason

Sept 06 trip - DAY TWO - Kyoto

xSept 06 trip - DAY TWO - Kyoto - 120.jpg
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

Here are the pics from Day Two of my September Kyoto trip.

I won't go into too much detail here - I've added extensive notes below the individual pics on my Flickr site.

It was a great day - I got to see some of the most important sites, including Kiyomizudera and we had two great meals - Italian food for lunch and Chinese food for dinner.

Next up is Monday - and our trip out of Kyoto to nearby Nara.

more to come....

-Jason

Sept 06 trip - DAY ONE - Kyoto

Sept 06 trip - DAY ONE - Kyoto - 26.jpg
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

Hey Gang,

I'm finally getting around to uploading my Kyoto trip pics.

Up now are the pics from Day One - Saturday, September 16th.

My friend, Kazuki, whom I met over the internet, met me at the bus station at around 2pm and we used the rest of the day to see a few of the sites around Kyoto before spending the entire day on Sunday sightseeing.

We went to Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, a famous picture-postcard spot surrounded by a wonderful garden.

We also had a great meal at an Irish Pub in the Gion district called Taggs (is that right Kazuki?). The assortment of restaurants is astonishing in Kyoto - especially compared to the meager selection out in Shimane.

And then we went to a cultural play, presenting many different cultural arts in one variety show. We walked through the famous Geisha district to get to the theatre, but we didn't spot any geisha walking about.

It was a good first day, despite the heat. Sunday would prove to be an even better day, but exhausting. I'll post those pics soon.

Oh, and on a weird side note, I fell down after getting out of the subway on the way to the hotel at the beginning of the day and ripped my favorite black jeans and bloodied up my knee. Not a good start, but it was ok.

Enjoy the pics!
-Jason

Andi Watson

Untitled-4
Originally uploaded by andi watson.

One of my favorite comic artists and graphic novelists - Andi Watson - has a Flickr page where he lets his fans behind the scenes, with glimpses into his sketchbook and ongoing projects.

He's incredibly talented and the nicest guy - every year at the big San Diego Con I would get him to sketch something for me. He can do all genres, but he excels at everyday people in everyday situations. But I also like his fun stuff, like these sketches of Buffy characters using the "super-deformed" style popular here in Japan.

You can find his graphic novels on Amazon, just search his name. I've even posted reviews there for a few of his books.

And click on this link to see more from his sketchbook.

He uses few lines and his work is often presented in black & white, but his sense of style is amazing, and his composition and use of negative space is fantastic.

Enjoy!
-Jason

USJ in Osaka - Oct '06

USJ in Osaka - Oct '06 - 26.jpg
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

so I'm still jumping around time-wise - these pics are from less than a month ago...

I met my friend, Kazuki, in Kyoto, and along with two of her friends, Taka san and Yuka chan, we joined a group from Izumo at USJ (Universal Studios Japan) for a day of fun and sun.

It was a great time, and I hope we can go again. I love theme parks, and have been to the Universal Studios in California many times, so it was cool to compare the two.

It's a fun day out and so easy to get to by train - i highly recommend it if you haven't been yet.

Enjoy the pics!
-Jason

2006 Speech Contests

2006 L. Hearn Speech Contest - 3.jpg
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

Click on this pic to be taken to 2 pages of pics of my kids in three specch contests: Lafcadio Hearn in Matsue, Hokuryo High School in Izumo and Gotsu HS in Gotsu.

Last year Taisha Chu had quite a successful speech season, winning at least one prize at each contest we went to. And one of my students won a prize at the first contest of this year, so that meant 4 contests in a row with at least one winner. But the streak was broken at Hokuryo and unfortuantely not reversed at Gotsu, with no winners at either of those contests this year.

Hearn is the hardest contest we go to each year - the selections are about 2 pages that the kids have to memorize and the English is somewhat antiquated and stilted at times - Hearn was an Irish writer who lived in Shimane over 100 years ago and wrote stories about his life in Japan and he also translated many Japanese myths into English.
Mami won a prize for her recitation of "Butterflies" which I've one student perform each of my 3 years, and Wakiko did a terrific job with her recitation of "Ubazakura" but didn't make the winner's circle this year. She loves English though and I know she'll try again in High School.

Mami became my "champion" student in a way - she entered two contests with me and won a prize both times, the only student I have to do that.

The other pics include new students trying their first contest this year. I was truly and deeply impressed with how hard two of my soccer boys, Junpei and Tsuyoshi, worked on their speeches and how much they improved. From barely being able to read their selections to getting up in front of an audience and delivering their speechs in loud voices with gestures, full of self-confidence - I was truly proud of them and realized that the journey is more important than wether they get a prize or not. The satisfaction is in the doing.
Yuna also did tremendously well for an ichi nen sei student, and I think she had a fun time, so she'll be back for more.

Both Saki and Ayaka got sick during our rehearsal time, so neither was able to fully deliver, but both did fine and I think both gained from the experience. It's tough, because I ask my speech kids to do a little bit of "acting" to really sell their speeches, but both of these girls, despite being genki and friendly, were reluctant to go the extra steps and constant cries of "hazukashii" (embarrassing) were heard. But both did a fine job with pronunciation and I think their English improved as a result of their involvement.

I urge any of you ALTs reading this to get involved with your kids in Speech Contests! It's a great way to spend time with your kids and get to know a few of them a little better.

Of course it helps to have an enthusiastic JTE helping or leading the way, so I need to acknowledge my speech champion - Yamamoto sensei, who lead the way last year and this year and really gave of her time to help the kids do well.

If my transfer to a High School goes thru, I hope I can continue to help kids with speech contests at that level.

-JCH

Araki Eigo club Halloween

I just added 4 more short videos, including this one, of Halloween activities at one of my elementary schools - Araki Shogakko.

Enjoy,
Jason

2006 Taisha Chu Taiikusai - part 2

2006 Taisha Chu Taiikusai - 102.jpg
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

So after reading the explanation below, you can click on this pick and be taken to the other end of these 9 pages of 159 pics and then work your way "forward" thru them.

Sports Day is a great and fun day for the students, and I had a great time this year! I was much more involved, being assigned a team to root for and dress up for, and even getting to play my own game with the students.

We got lucky - it looked like rain, but remained dry all day and I eventually got really sunburned as no one had any sunscreen to lend me. The kids worked really hard and had a great time competing and dancing and singing.

I have video of two of the groups doing their routines, and I'll try and get those posted to my YouTube site soon.

Enjoy!
-Jason

2006 Taisha Chu Taiikusai - an explanation

2006 Taisha Chu Taiikusai - 94.jpg
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

OK - here is the simple story - click on this pic and be taken to my Flickr site where I've uploaded 159 pics of my Jr High's Sports Day festival. That's about 9 pages of pics to look thru.

Here's the somewhat more involved explanation for those that care:

First - a technical disclaimer:
knowing I would have to upload 159 pictures, I decided to try out one of Flickr's upload tools - since the normal procedure only allows you to upload 6 pictures at a time - a process that would have taken me hours for 159 pics.
After downloading the uploader (how's that for a sentence?) - i told it which pics I wanted to send to Flickr, and off it went - the whole process only took about 10 minutes. Great - right?

Well, yes - mostly. The only glitch is that instead of simply uploading the pics in numerical order, it uploaded them is a weird type of alphabetic/numeric order. That is - all the pics starting with the number 9 got uploaded together, all those starting with 8 together, etc. Meaning that picture #9 is grouped with pictures #90-99, instead of being in order after pic #8 and before pic #10. And the pics numbered #200+ come after pics #20-29, and then we get the pics labeled #100+. So things are a little random as far as the order goes. But I've labeled many of the pics, so that should help. And I'm sure I can figure out ways around this uploading style to avoid problems like this in the future.

So click here and you'll be taken to the "beginning" of the 9 pages, and mostly be working your way back thru the day in reverse chronilogaical order. I'll post a pic ABOVE this one that will allow you to start at the other end of the pages and work your way forward.

-Jason

This weekend

Hello All,

Had a good weekend so far - how was yours?

Yesterday I went to a local English school for a small Halloween party. It was fun and the students had a good time. Then I tutored my two shogakusei in the evening, and then watched American TV I've downloaded from iTunes. Good Stuff! Currently I'm watching all the following shows:

Battlestar Galactica
Prison Break
Studio 60
LOST
Survivor

and I'm also trying out two other shows:

Heroes & The Nine (both look promising).

Then on Sunday (today) I met three friends, Angelo, Ewan & Mark, up near where I live in Taisha for a Soba noodle tasting festival. I've gone every year, and it's always tasty! This year we were blessed with fantastic weather (it had rained a bit last year), so I walked up to the site, about 20 minutes from my house on foot, and we sat in the sun and ate both cold soba and hot soba. Oishikatta desu!

Tonight I have to clean my apartment, which has gotten somewhat cluttered; with all the traveling I've been doing lately and as busy as I've been at work, I haven't had the time or energy to keep my place at Jason-level tidiness. But I'll rectify that today.

So I should have pictures up soon showing my great weekend last weekend in Osaka and Kyoto. USJ was a blast! Had great fun! And Himeji Castle was impressive as well.

Look for more updates soon.

Hope all is well.

-Jason

San Nen Sei jikoshokai (self-introductions) {movie}

Here is a short minute-long clip of some of my best 9th grade students introducing themselves on camera. The sound sync seems a bit off, but sometimes if you play it a 2nd time it gets better.

Click on the "YouTube" icon to be taken to my YouTube page and you can see the other two groups do their jikoshokai.

Enjoy,
Jason

Halloween lesson with Shogakusei (video)

Here is a quick clip of my 5th graders at Taisha Sho after we had a Halloween lesson. You get a quick glimpse of me in my Merlin/Gandalf/Dumbledore sensei costume.

Osaka & Himeji

Hello All,

I'm off this weekend on another sightseeing tour of Japan. I'm determined to see a good deal more of this country before I leave.

So this weekend, I'm visiting Osaka and USJ (Universal Studios Japan) with friends on Saturday, seeing a fall festival in Kyoto on Sunday, and then going to the famous Himeji Castle on Monday (taking that day off work).

Should be a fun weekend, and let's hope that the weather stays nice - dry and cool.

So more pictures next week - a truly massive update of over 100 pictures from Taisha Chu's Sports Day is next up and I've got some more funny video clips on the way too.

Hope all is well in your corner of the world.

-Jason

Sports Day prep

Sports Day prep (First day of new term) - 12
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

click on this pic to be taken to the begining of a massive update of about 60 pics.

I tried to take pictures over the course of about two weeks detailing many of the aspects of my students getting ready for their annual Sports Day.
You can read more about it in the captions under the individual pics.

Sports Day, called Taiikusai or Undokai in Japanese, is a big deal here - with each 9th grade class being assigned a color and those color teams competing against each other in Sporting events as well as a team sing-a-long and team dance routine, complete with costumes. The entire school is involved, and the event takes up an entire, exhausting day.

I got in on the act this year by making up my own game for the kids to play - the "Catch the Ball" game! Basically I threw an American football at two students and if one of them caught it they got 10 points for their team.

Soon to follow will be an even more massive update with pictures from the actual event.

Enjoy the pics!

-Jason
proud member of the third place Blue Team!

2006 Shimane Orientation for new JETs

2006 Shimane Orientation for new JETs - 13
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

more random pics from last summer are up on my site.

I won't go into too much detail here since I've added descriptions to most of the individual photos, but you'll see pics of:

1- Shimane Orientation for the new JETs
a two-day event we have in late August to get the new ALTs and CIRs ready for work and the coming months

2 - teaching at a day care
I spent one afternoon with the brand new Izumo ALTs at a Taisha town day care this past summer, playing games and reading books to the kids in the sweltering heat.

3 - really random pics like of the thermometer in my house and my kids doing an excellent job on an extra credit project.

Enjoy
Jason

Summer Diary English board

Summer Diary eigo board - 5
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

I've posted a few random pics - so click thru to my Flickr account and check em out.

First up are some pics of the wall outside my main English classroom on the 2nd floor of my Jr High.
I decorate this wall with all kinds of stuff all-year-round, but recently I put up a bunch of pictures I took over the summer break and this display has proved to be very popular with the students, since it consists mostly of pictures of them.
So I'll continue this trend and work this week on a new display of pics from their all-school Sports Day back in September.

After that there are some pics of my friend Ang's Sports Day at her school - Taisha High School. I went by and hung out at her sports day for about two hours - it was fun to watch how they do things at the high school level and I got to see some of my former students who are now at her school.

more pics to come this week - so stay tuned!

-Jason

Sam & Tyler's bday karaoke

Sam & Tyler's bday karaoke - 1
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

If the JET community (and increasingly the NOVA community as well) in Izumo has a favorite bar, then it's the one called Number One - we go there a lot.

It has a huge main room, much bigger than they almost ever need, so it's ideal for large gatherings. It's not quite a "gaijin bar" like Kayas or Filaments in Matsue, since we don't go there nightly, but it's the one bar we all know and enjoy.

They have a friendly staff and an "open mike" style karaoke set-up, so even tho I almost never drink alcohol, I still go along for the karaoke.

We had such a gathering a little while ago to celebrate the birthday of two new ALTs - Tyler and Sam. Their birthdays are just a few days apart, so we all gathered at Number 1 and did the nomihodai - or all you can drink special. And we sang a bunch of karaoke.

Now some JETs will tell you that their enjoyment of karaoke is in direct proportion to how drunk they are - but I enjoy it sober. I'm weird like that. :P

I never thought I was a good singer, but I've found a few songs that I guess fit my vocal range/style and since I'm comfortable singing them, I guess it comes across as skill and/or confidence, because I often get small compliments on my singing. I think the key is to just go for it and sing full voice - I always sound better at full volume I think. And even though I do annoy my neighbors with my occasional shower singing, I rarely get a chance to just belt out a tune except at karaoke. (Although I do sing rather loudly in my car when I'm driving - I'm sure to the bewilderment of the Japanese drivers around me)

But now my only problem is I keep singing the same songs over and over. I've been here for more than two years now, and my frequent karaoke partners, like the JETs in Izumo, must be so tired of me singing "New York, New York" and "Take Me Home (Country Roads)" and "Johnny B. Goode" by now. I try and sing some new songs, but the karaoke selection in Izumo is limited when it comes to songs in English. I recently went to Kyoto and sang karaoke and was amazed at how many more songs they had to choose from.

And I sing mostly "oldies" I guess - altho I do break out a Radiohead or Oasis song on occasion, I don't often sing anything from say 2000 to now - I just am a little out of the loop on current Western music and hip/hop is not my style. And I actually have a modicum of respect for the guys that can really rap - I've seen it attempted countless times in karaoke bars by amateurs - and it's really hard to do and pull off. So even tho I enjoy some rap I stay away from it at karaoke bars (with the exception of "Baby's Got Back" - it's a guaranteed sing-a-long, but such a long song).

And I would like to be able to sing some Japanese songs, but the text goes by way too fast for me to keep up. They make it somewhat easier for us novice Nihongo learners by adding furigana (the small hiragana letters put atop the harder to decipher kanji characters) to the lyrics, but it still goes by too fast for me to read and sing-along to. So I join in on the chorus of songs I know if they are requested by other singers more adept at Japanese than me.

So the next time you're in Izumo, let's head out to a karaoke bar (or the cool karaoke box place we have here called "Salsa") and get to singing!

-Jason "Mack the Knife" Harris

Playing Janken with my 8th graders

ok - my last little bit of fun with my digital camera movie function - a 2 min clip of my 8th graders playing a janken game in class. Read more about the vid on YouTube.com

See you,
Jason

my Japanese students playing TtR

Having more fun with my movie function on my digital camera...

Here are some of my coolest 9th graders playing a very cool board game called Ticket to Ride and saying hi to my Mom and Dad.

30 seconds.

-Jason

Sada HS taiko team

Before going to Kyoto, I finally wised up and bought a memory card for my digital camera. So now I can take like 250 pics without having to upload to my laptop. But the other nifty benefit is that I can take about 8 minutes of video/movie footage as well. I never really used the movie feature on the camera before, but this past weekend, my friend Ang's taiko team, from the local high school out in Sada, performed in Taisha town, and Ang couldn't be there, so I thought I'd give the movie feature a shot.

Turned out fine, depsite my shaky camera work and inability to zoom. The clip here is only about 90 seconds long, but it gives you a taste for it.

I've decided to use YouTube for my vids - it's a great site, but they were just bought out by Google for some ungodly amount of money, so things may change.

I'll post the vid here, or you can search YouTube.com for me - my user name there is "myargonauts".

Cheers,
Jason