So a couple of my more oblivious Japanese friends recently had some of their photos deleted from Facebook and they couldn't understand why. It wasn't until they sent me copies via e-mail that I understood.
I knew all about the manji character and that it was used to mark the location of Buddhist temples on maps but I had no idea this was a fad in Japanese social media now.
I wonder if that one kid knows he's wearing a Yankees hat.
Quote from: Gusington on June 16, 2018, 06:11:13 PM
I wonder if that one kid knows he's wearing a Yankees hat.
Based on him also wearing a Hilfiger coat, I'd say 'No'.
They're all sports teams, right?
No... they're all band names.
"Hillfinger" is clearly an anime. Probably one of those animes. ^-^
That weird icon on the hat is a glyph, from that anime where people keep trying to bring back the dead.
I fear I will never understand the Japanese.
My wife taught English in Toyko for two years. They've scrubbed WW2 over there.
The rules of her employment actually included direct instructions that she was never to answer any questions about WW2. She was told to always deflect and say that the Emperor had very bad advice and it led to a horrible misunderstanding between two countries who are clearly friends.
That was pretty much it, if they asked further she was told to deflect and ask them to talk to their families or read themselves at a library.
Average Japanese on the street, especially young ones, are honestly shocked at why they're so hated by Korea and China.
I've had much the same experience in my running into exchange students in the US. I've had one Korean and one Japanese, thankfully not in the same class the same year. The Korean student was hyper aware of everything that happened in WW2, and could name a specific Japanese atrocity right off the cuff.
The Japanese student was honestly aghast at my class, that did cover WW2. She was almost totally unaware of even the most basic details if the war, while being very well versed on the occupation and rebuilding period after.
It's pretty stunning stuff.
I lived there for nine years. I was never given any instruction to avoid talking about the war but it never really came up either. The English textbooks glossed over it. The one we used was called New Horizons and the only mention of anything related to the war years was a story about a Japanese girl who got radiation poisoning from the A-bombs and told herself if she could make 1,000 origami cranes, she'd get over her sickness.
The story started with "One day an airplane appeared in the sky..."
back in the 60's when things were pretty dodgy politically in Japan, textbook editors were threatened and some even killed by ultra-nationalists if they said anything negative about Japan's activities during the period of colonialism and the war years.
Gus, one of the reasons I left Japan was that it all started to make sense to me. Felt like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft novel going insane with the discovery of forbidden truths.
do we really need to bring up Gus's hidden truths?
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on June 16, 2018, 11:15:27 PM
I lived there for nine years. I was never given any instruction to avoid talking about the war but it never really came up either. The English textbooks glossed over it. The one we used was called New Horizons and the only mention of anything related to the war years was a story about a Japanese girl who got radiation poisoning from the A-bombs and told herself if she could make 1,000 origami cranes, she'd get over her sickness.
The story started with "One day an airplane appeared in the sky..."
back in the 60's when things were pretty dodgy politically in Japan, textbook editors were threatened and some even killed by ultra-nationalists if they said anything negative about Japan's activities during the period of colonialism and the war years.
Gus, one of the reasons I left Japan was that it all started to make sense to me. Felt like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft novel going insane with the discovery of forbidden truths.
That's really interesting to me SDR. What years were you there, what occupation? I'm kind of fascinated to see based on your experience, and my wife's which was '03-'05 working for NOVA. I had my only Japanese student in '04. The historiography of the how they discuss things fascinates me.
Quote from: SirAndrewD on June 16, 2018, 11:39:10 PM
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on June 16, 2018, 11:15:27 PM
I lived there for nine years. I was never given any instruction to avoid talking about the war but it never really came up either. The English textbooks glossed over it. The one we used was called New Horizons and the only mention of anything related to the war years was a story about a Japanese girl who got radiation poisoning from the A-bombs and told herself if she could make 1,000 origami cranes, she'd get over her sickness.
The story started with "One day an airplane appeared in the sky..."
back in the 60's when things were pretty dodgy politically in Japan, textbook editors were threatened and some even killed by ultra-nationalists if they said anything negative about Japan's activities during the period of colonialism and the war years.
Gus, one of the reasons I left Japan was that it all started to make sense to me. Felt like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft novel going insane with the discovery of forbidden truths.
That's really interesting to me SDR. What years were you there, what occupation? I'm kind of fascinated to see based on your experience, and my wife's which was '03-'05 working for NOVA. I had my only Japanese student in '04. The historiography of the how they discuss things fascinates me.
how about german students? i mean you cant even sell a game in germany that has a swastika in it so just wondering how they treat the subject matter. very interesting stuff indeed.
Quote from: CptHowdy on June 17, 2018, 01:04:32 AM
how about german students? i mean you cant even sell a game in germany that has a swastika in it so just wondering how they treat the subject matter. very interesting stuff indeed.
Never had a one myself. I had UK exchange girl, super smart and sort of dismissive of our education system. Most wild and salacious was a Saudi boy who had a sit in with a Isreali Air Force Pilot, and that almost had some fireworks.
But no Germans, ever. I did have a Romanian. She, scholastically, was one of the best students I ever had. Hyper smart, wonderful girl. She mentored with me a bit and I loved picking her brain and making her think.
WW2 was her bane though. We got to it in my my 20th Century AP class. She was horribly ashamed of her country's history. But she was intelligently defensive, understanding the horrific rock and hard place her country was in. She wasn't happy that her country was an Axis member, but she was super educated about why they were. She was a great kid. We had a lot of very direct and frank WW2 conversations when she was in my class.
Quote from: CptHowdy on June 17, 2018, 01:04:32 AM
how about German students? i mean you cant even sell a game in germany that has a swastika in it so just wondering how they treat the subject matter. very interesting stuff indeed.
don't worry, when i was a student i got literally flooded with topics from National Socialism timeframe: propaganda methods, the coordination, persecution of the Jews, Holocaust, and those things repetitive
in different classes like Religion, History, German Language, Social studies, and at different age levels and it was the pet issue of young teachers in training.
but not once single word about any militaryhistory of WW2, campaigns, strategies, tactics, important battles etc, none!
and not one word of let's call it
positive achievements (in technology, or military) in those 12 years
what a lot of esp greenleft people don't get today, is that the proper Nazi symbol look like in this picture on the tail of a Ju87, every other turned, mirrored, crippled, or distorted versions are something different.
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi66.tinypic.com%2Fol8p1.jpg&hash=819499e958e867419df79dc26573f3e47e18b559)
(only exception are the banner/ancient/standard of some state and NSDAP party services and esp the Leibstandarte AH which got blown up into a full SS-Panzerdivison in the late years of the war.
those banners had the swastika turned 45 degrees to the left, so not on the tip )
in most of the time of global human history it was a symbol of the sun, or a wheel of life circle, and a sign for luck such things.
Quote from: SirAndrewD on June 16, 2018, 11:39:10 PM
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on June 16, 2018, 11:15:27 PM
I lived there for nine years. I was never given any instruction to avoid talking about the war but it never really came up either. The English textbooks glossed over it. The one we used was called New Horizons and the only mention of anything related to the war years was a story about a Japanese girl who got radiation poisoning from the A-bombs and told herself if she could make 1,000 origami cranes, she'd get over her sickness.
The story started with "One day an airplane appeared in the sky..."
back in the 60's when things were pretty dodgy politically in Japan, textbook editors were threatened and some even killed by ultra-nationalists if they said anything negative about Japan's activities during the period of colonialism and the war years.
Gus, one of the reasons I left Japan was that it all started to make sense to me. Felt like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft novel going insane with the discovery of forbidden truths.
That's really interesting to me SDR. What years were you there, what occupation? I'm kind of fascinated to see based on your experience, and my wife's which was '03-'05 working for NOVA. I had my only Japanese student in '04. The historiography of the how they discuss things fascinates me.
I first went for three years from '97 til 2000. I was teaching at a technical college in Poland prior to that and my father sent me a clipping from my hometown's newspaper saying that our sister-city in Kanagawa, Japan was looking for someone to work as an English teacher at various junior high schools as well as a cultural liaison to help out with homestay exchanges and the like. I was hired directly by the city but basically had the same contract as teachers on the JET programme which had a three-year limit.
I returned to Canada and got a job teaching ESL at a private school in Vancouver and worked there for just under a year. I missed living in Japan so I emailed my boss and asked him if he had a line on any jobs. He had a friend from college who was the vice-principal at a private high school in rural Japan that was looking for an English teacher and they hired me on. The school had been exclusively dedicated to sports and had a pretty famous and well-respected baseball training programme but they were starting to lose some students to larger schools closer to the big cities so they decided to branch out and offer different courses of study such as fine arts, IT, and language and international studies. They hired me to teach English and a Korean woman and a giant Mongolian woman to teach Korean and Mandarin. In my first year, I taught at this school 4 days a week and I also taught at an all girls' high school in the next town once a week. That school was teetering on bankruptcy though and cancelled my contract at the end of the year (and went bankrupt a year after that) so I ended up working at my main school full time. I stayed there for six years and enjoyed the hell out of my time there.
I also taught in South Korea for a year (and definitely didn't enjoy my time there), Poland for a year, Saipan for three months, and Thailand for a year and a half.
I had a few German students at the language school in Vancouver. They were fine and got along well with everyone for the most part. The students that tended to give us the most problems were the Saudis, the Brazilians, and the Koreans. The Saudis and the Brazilians tended to come from very, very wealthy backgrounds and expected to be waited on and catered to. They didn't really react well when they learned that they weren't going to be afforded special treatment. The Koreans were the most xenophobic and reluctant to mix with other nationalities. When the world cup was on, they wanted to use our main meeting room with the big TV to have a party and watch the matches. We told them it was fine, but that they'd have to invite everyone from the school. They refused and a few even quit the school. They'd also either lodge complaints or have complaints lodged against them from their homestay hosts and most would quickly move out and get their own places rather than live with families.
As it was an English school, world history didn't really come up so the war was never really a topic of conversation (although I did have one Italian student and one Turk who loved talking about the wars and were constantly giving each other a hard time over their nation's histories but in a good-natured way.)
My U.S. students are largely ignorant of communism and the U.S. Constitution even when basic contract and property rights issues come up in advanced business classes. They learn quickly, but lack basic knowledge of the Constitution.
Enjoyed reading about your Japan experience.
Romanian tour guide was very knowledgeable. Serbs were in denial even about the butchery in the 1990s.
Thanks SDR. Really interesting.
Most interested in some of what you say about not liking South Korea. That had some overlap with my very enthusiastic South Korean exchange student. He brought me a government approved textbook that had some cartoon depictions of history that depicted the Japanese as buck tooth madmen and Roosevelt being told what to do against the Germans by horrible Jewish stereotypes complete with braids and big enhanced noses.
As to what you say Airboy, yeah, U.S. students have their problems. My kids don't know one whit about the Constitution. They don't even have the most basic of understanding about Communism or Fascism.
I've made my Government class a Constitution Class. We just go over it line by line. I keep to the approved texts where I can but use the Constitution as my basic document.
Not a lot I can outside that. They get to me with no basic understanding. I had to spend an entire class one time, in '05 with nothing written on my Smart Board but "Europe is not a Country, it is a Continent. Austria is not Australia. The U.S. was originally a colony of the United Kingdom, which was Great Britain and has England in it. "
I just made them stare at that for an hour. It didn't take.
I didn't enjoy my experience in Korea for a variety of reasons. I found my job through a head-hunting agency based in Virginia. I paid them $75 or so to find a placement for me (it was before the internet was really a thing). They initially offered me a job in the city of Ulsan but then suggested I turn it down based on some things they'd been hearing. I'd already been waiting about 6 weeks by that point and was getting antsy (and broke) so I stupidly said I'd take the job regardless.
Ulsan is an industrial city where they mainly made tanker ships and chemicals. It was a polluted hellhole. The inhabitants were mainly young guys fresh out of the military or college and they'd just landed their first job. Korea was like Japan at that time and once you got hired on with a corporation, you were an employee for life. Also, like Japan, seniority rules and young employees were expected to "pay their dues" when starting out so they'd get stuck with shit jobs and be expected to work 14 hour days. End result was that there were a lot of young, angry, resentful drunk guys wandering the streets each night just looking for an excuse to start a fight. Also, they guy:girl ratio was about 4:1 so they had even more reason to be pissed off.
The place I taught was basically a privately-owned ESL school and we mainly taught schoolkids before and after their regular classes, bored housewives during the day, and a few company classes during the evenings and weekends. The places were springing up all over Korea and most were pretty dodgy and run as cheaply as possible. Our school was no exception. Basically the guys who opened these places would have been used car salesmen if they lived here.
When I arrived, I'd already signed a contract laying out hours, salary, dress code, holidays, health benefits and all the usual stuff. One of the biggest complaints I heard from foreign teachers all over Korea was the fact that Koreans don't see contracts the same way we do. At least not when it comes to foreign workers. It was the norm for the school managers to try to get as many concessions out of the teachers as possible. I was immediately asked to work weekends (contract said Mon-Fri), extra hours, wear a suit and tie (contract said business casual), tell my students I was American (I'm a Canuck but since we were teaching American English...), and before work they wanted me to hang out in front of the train station and pester people with fliers for the school. They also demanded that I turn over my passport to them....for safety.
The school was a pretty bad work environment.
They took more off my paycheque than was agreed to each month for medical insurance. I got very sick during the winter (pneumonia, I think but never did find out) and they were very reluctant to take me to a doctor. They'd just tell me to go lie on the couch for an hour between classes. I had to pin the school manager to the wall and threaten him before he finally relented and took me to a quack. I then found out that they hadn't actually been paying for my insurance but had just been pocketing the money instead.
We were given 2 weeks off in December for holidays so three of us decided we'd go to Guam and Saipan for a vacation. We then had a huge row with the school owner because he'd told all of our students that we'd be taking them on a study/vacation trip to a ski resort. Never once asked any of us, of course and he was livid when we said no. One of the girls had been naive enough to hand over her passport when she first arrived and they refused to give it back to her and she went through hell trying to get it. (ended up getting the US embassy involved but I don't know the specifics.).
There were many other incidents such as these with the school and it was definitely not limited to my employer. Nearly every other teacher I'd met in Korea had similar or worse stories about their employer. There is still several websites dedicated to warning teachers about ESL employers in various countries. S. Korea and China still make up the vast majority of entries.
Life outside the school wasn't a lot better either. I shared an apartment with a greasy teacher from Pittsburgh and the landlord would regularly shut off the water saying we used too much. The girls shared an apartment a few blocks from us which was much nicer than ours but was kitty-corner to a dogmeat abattoir and they'd get quite upset at the constant sound of dogs getting offed.
The foreign teacher community was pretty vibrant and we managed to have a good time amongst ourselves but befriending Koreans was quite difficult compared to other countries so we tended to be a pretty insular group. A few of the teachers got deported after it was discovered that they had taken side gigs doing one-on-one tutoring. The employers acted like they were stealing students from the school (in some cases they were) and immediately fired them and had them deported within a day. A fair number from our social group up and quit, did midnight runners to Seoul or Pusan, and just worked illegally as freelancers. If you were young and attractive, you could do quite well for yourself. The various school owners would lose their shit whenever someone did a runner and those of us who remained in town would all be read the riot act.
After about 9 months, I decided I'd had enough and, rather than doing a runner, I decided to be aboveboard and told my boss that I didn't think it was working out and gave him 6 weeks notice. Big mistake! Wow did he get petulant and vindictive. My schedule suddenly changed so that I started teaching and 5:30 am and didn't finish until 11 am with a tonne of 1 or 2 hour breaks during the day. Just enough so that I couldn't get away or go do anything useful. They kept the entirety of my last paycheque, saying I owed them for telephone bills and oil. They also arranged to take me out for a farewell dinner, then changed the location without telling me (I stood out front of the originally scheduled restaurant for 90 minutes before leaving) and then presented me with the bill for everyone's food and drinks the next day. I told them to get stuffed and pay it out of the money they'd stolen already and flew to Saipan the next day for a job there.