cherry blossoms after season

Just another sporadic update.

Moving to Japan and becoming an English teacher has kept me quite busy. I can’t believe how time has flown by since my plane touched down at Narita International Airport nearly three months ago.

Living and working here hasn’t been easy to say the least. I’ve been teaching at three different schools – two middle schools, and one elementary – and now my Board of Education has informed me that I have to teach at two more elementary schools starting next month.

Teaching has definitely been a rewarding experience, despite how I’ve been, and how crazy and interesting my students are, so hopefully I’ll be able to handle bouncing between five schools when the time comes.

(I’m going to do a special post called “My Students Say the Darndest Things!” soon. It’ll be dedicated to all the crazy things I encounter at work everyday. Trust me, it gets pretty funny and crazy, so stay tuned for that.)

When you’re an Assistant Language Teacher, you have to hit the ground running. There’s no time to learn the ropes, they throw you into the deep end, and you become a master of improvisation as you figure out what works and doesn’t work for your lessons less than two minutes before class starts. I feel like I’m turning into an English teaching, American culture promoting superhero here. ^_^

I’ve also dealt with a series of unfortunate events since the moment I arrived. Like…

1) Being swindled into buying a piece of crap car that has cost me a lot of money and tears.

2) Having old junk dumped into my apartment because people didn’t want to pay to throw it away. In Japan, it’s pretty hard to throw anything big away, and you have to pay to do it. So people who work/worked at my job graciously left me things like a bed from the 1970′s and a moldy table. It caused me a lot of stress to figure out how to get rid of it, but luckily a nice old couple I met helped me with these issues. Never ever doubt the power of kindness and the difference it can make in another person’s life. I feel so grateful and indebted to those people.

3) Not having the internet for 2 month because the ISP company forgot to forward my information to the local phone company.

4) Having my right eye swell shut to the size of a grapefruit because of a possible bug bite or bacterial infection.

5) Being given an ancient, leaky washer that has been flooding my apartment like the Red Sea from my employer.

I could go on with this list, but I honestly don’t want to dwell on the bad things because my problems have been slowly disappearing one by one. There have been amazing things for every bad thing that has happened here. Like…

1) Falling in love with writing all over again. I’ve been working on the manuscript in between classes to blow off all the stress I’ve been dealing with, and it has been wonderfully therapeutic. I’ve been remembering why I fell in love with creating stories in the first place. Not to mention living in a small apartment with no television has also helped my imagine run wild.

2) Building international friendships. I’ve met some great people, not only from Japan, but also New Zealand and Korea.

3) Meeting writers from different backgrounds in unexpected places. This third point is what the heart of this update is about…

I met a truly amazing writer in a very unlikely place while being here. In fact, she’s the principal at one of the schools I teach at. She’s also not your average writer, she’s a poet – a poet of haiku to be exact.

I’m sure most of you know what haiku are, but for those of you who don’t, they’re Japanese poems made up of three lines each, which follow a syllable pattern of  5-7-5 for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line.

Well anyways, the principal at my school writes a new haiku everyday and posts it in the office for everyone to see. One day this month, she asked me to go outside with her and talk. She then took me to a barren cherry tree, and pointed out how there were three small cherry blossoms on one of the branches . They were beautiful, and a miracle since they weren’t supposed to bloom until the spring. It was very surprising, and my principal told me that she just had to share the miracle with me.

She then decided to write a haiku about it, and then asked me to help her translate it into English. Of course my translation didn’t follow the 5-7-5 format because it’s very difficult to do when you transfer it from one language to another, but what we came up with together is something I’m very proud of, and it goes like this:

today,

the cherry blossoms on the branch

open after season, I wonder

The principal then wrote it out on special paper with a Japanese calligraphy brush and then drew a beautiful picture of cherry blossoms on the sheet. Though the next part I wasn’t expecting at all. She made another copy and gave it to me as a gift. I was so happy and thankful to receive it because it was beautiful and something we worked on together.

We also ended up taking pictures of the cherry blossoms. You can see one of the pictures I took in the icon picture for this post.

One thing that this experience taught me is that regardless of the language, culture, and writing style, it’s an amazing and beautiful thing for how easy one writer can understand another writer’s heart.

Working on that haiku with the principal is an experience I’ll never forget, and from one writer to another, I really encourage you to get out there and meet fellow writers from other cultures. It’ll make you see your craft in a new light and give you more experiences that will make you a better writer.

That’s all for now.

Take care until the next time.

*HUGS*

-Penny