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Hello!

We've just come back from Oban vacation today, after a very successful and exciting Summer Tour! I want to tell just a little about our biggest adventure during the week!

Last Thursday, we travelled to Takamatsu so take part in the three day Saunki Festival that was happening at the time. We got there in the middle of the second day, and after a little bit of trouble finding a parking spot, we were on our way!

The festival itself was a ton of fun. We got a chance to see some really talented J-Pop musicians, who had a very loyal fan base, as they were dancing just as much as the singers were! We also got a chance to explore the festival grounds, and try some of the amazing foods that were for sale. Japan doesn't seem to be very big on spicy foods, because I certainly impressed some vendors with the amount of hot sauce I put on my meal!

The absolute highlight of the night was, of course, the fireworks. This year was the 50th anniversary of this particular festival, so the fireworks display was amazing. Over 12,000 fireworks were set off, and was such a beautiful sight, even the rain couldn't stop me from being impressed. It was the topper to a very successful and exciting day!

I'm looking forward now to finishing this semester, and very excited for the new one happening in September!

A  

There have been so many summer festivals happening around me! It's been hard to choose where I should go! Luckily the Takamatsu festival was going on and the day I picked was the night for fireworks! Like I mentioned before, I was not impressed with my last fireworks viewing, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

My friends and I met a great group of foriegners (and quite a lot of them!) and we got to sit with them. I was pleasantly surprised to see an aquaintance from Kansai Gaidai and meet someone else who had been studying there the same semester as me.

The fireworks were spectacular, I don't think I've ever seen a show so good! People kept standing in the way, and the rain was pouring on all of us, but the show never stopped. Some of the fireworks were so big that it didn't matter that people were in the way.   

Hello everyone! I hope that all if the students who attended Summer Tour had a great time, I know all of the teachers and staff worked so hard to make it enjoyable for everyone!

For the Obon holiday, I took a trip to Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka. I wowon't say too much about the trip right now, as I am still in Osaka and will be on to my next activity soon, but I will write about my trip for the next few blogs. So you will get to hear all about!



  

  

Yesterday was awesome! I had the opportunity to go to Tokushima to attend the festival of dance. I went with my sister, my brother in law, and my best friend Mizuki! We got to try some foods and watch the festival! It was amazing! After we were finished at the festival we went to a mexican restaurant. It was so delicious! i haven't had mexican food in so long and it was all so amazing! I had a really great time and today I am going to the Takamatsu festival to see the fireworks!

  

We hosted a large event for our kids. I LOVED it. It was a lot of fun seeing all of the kids together in one place and to see them outside of the class setting, acting in their natural silly confusing ways. It was a two-day event so we got to stay overnight with most of them (well, the male teachers got to stay with the boy students, etc.), and as a coworker said in the morning, “This is the stuff of childhood.” Indeed, we spent some twenty minutes having pillow and blanket fights in the mornings to get everyone riled up and then geared up for the rest of the event. I know that the event can be very stressful for the organizers and the staff, but for us teachers it is a bit different. We were basically in charge of our respective activity booths and costumes, and then we were, of course, charged with entertaining our respective teams. That was perhaps one of the best parts of the event: having a team composed of mainly your own students. I was lucky because most of my team were my angels from Kokubunji! We played with our food and goofed around with English relevant to dining and taste testing. But I guess one of the best moments for the kids was the actual activities themselves. Apparently one of the kids wrote that he loved my and a co-teacher’s Robin Hood booth, and well our booth was fun! Pictured below is a snapshot of the trees we built and used for our booth. Whoever compiled the folder of pictures of props that we transferred to the event site was confused by the cutouts, as can be seen with the label “trees??” Yeah, the booth was a bit confusing, and we improvised on the spot an additional activity to the original booth: We used the “trees” as hiding spots for the kids to sneak through to get to a endpoint, at which point we would then pick up arrows and shoot at targets. Yeah, it was fun even for me! I just hope my partner had as much fun playing as the “bad guy” who we had to sneak past.


  

  

Hello, all!

I have many favorite places. Some are in America, some are in Europe, and some are elsewhere in Asia, but many of my favorite places are right here in Japan! Here are five places that I always recommend to everybody:

#5: Daio Wasabi Farm, Azumino, Nagano-ken

Do you like wasabi? I don't like it very much! Even so, the Daio Wasabi Farm is great. It's the biggest wasabi farm in Japan, and has many unique foods available. (There's wasabi ice cream, delicious wasabi juice, and even wasabi oyaki!) But the best part is watching the wasabi grow. It's planted in flowing water, and the farmers use some very interesting techniques to make it flourish. It looks beautiful, and smells great! If you're ever near Matsumoto and want to relax and learn, this is the place to do it.

#4: Meiji Jingu Gyoen, Tokyo


Meiji Jingu is my favorite place in Tokyo. Like Shinjuku Gyoen, it's a relaxing break from the heart of the city. But Meiji Jingu has a secret! For 500 yen, you can get into a small but very beautiful garden where almost no one goes. It's full of animals (my pictures show a local man feeding the songbirds and a very fat tanuki; there are also herons, turtles, cranes, deer, rabbits, Dwayne-Johnson-sized koi, and more!) and some truly lovely scenery. If you're ever in Tokyo and you want to write Romantic poetry, this is the place to do it.

#3: Hakodate, Hokkaido

Hakodate is not very popular. It's a little like Shikokuchuo or Kanonji: people think it's a nice place to live, but don't want to visit. But actually, Hakodate is really interesting! The southernmost port in Hokkaido has a long history of international communication. You can find buildings in styles from all over the world, and there's a very unique and historical star-shaped fort. I love the city's isthmus-shaped layout too. Mount Hakodate has a lovely view of the whole city, but just under the mountain is my favorite place of all: the Foreigners' Cemetery, where foreign people who died in Japan were buried before the opening of the country. If you're ever up North and you want to experience how Japan changed during the Meiji Restoration, this is the place to do it.

#2: Shirakawa-go, Gifu-ken

Shirakawa-go is a time capsule: a tiny mountain village where everything seems to be at least 200 years old. It's a famous tourist destination for its architecture and its peaceful location, so many Americans say it's not "authentic." And it's true—Shirakawa-go only exists because tourist come and pay the local families to sleep in the centuries-old minshuku and see the gassho-zukuri village. But that doesn't make Shirakawa-go any less real. There is just no better way to get a feeling for rural life in old Japan than a night in this very unique village. If you're ever near Takayama and you want to learn what furusato really means, this is the place to do it.

#1: Ō-yama, Kanagawa-ken

Perhaps it's because Minnesota is so flat, but I've always loved taking long hikes in the mountains of Japan. Although I have climbed Mount Fuji (which is very beautiful!) and many others, my personal favorite mountain is Ō-yama. It's a convenient day trip from Tokyo; it's high enough to feel like a challenge but not high enough to be exhausting; it's got great temples, shrines, animals, and dango (and I mean great handmade dango); there are several different paths so you don't get bored; it's full of history, but not crowded with people. In short, if you do one mountain hike in Japan, Ō-yama is the place to do it.

Once again, if you ever have time to travel around Japan, be sure to visit these places. Don't forget to let me know how you like them!

—Matthew  

I don't have much free time right now, with Summer Tour on Monday, but when I do, I like to play this new card game I found on-line. It's called Japanese: The Game, and it is basically a card game that is supposed to help teach you Japanese vocabulary and grammar. It is very similar to a trading card game in which you buy a main deck, and then get expansion decks for topics that interest you. I haven't played it very much yet, but so far I really like it!
  

Last weekend, it was my town's summer festival! The Sakaide Ohashimatsuri was a 2 day event. I feel like my town is kind of small, so I was impressed by how much went on!

I wore my yukata and tied the obi myself. It held up really well.

I made it a point to find something strange to eat, so I tried a small squid on a stick.

The first day was an all-inclusive parade for the town. Hundreds of people teamed up to dance in the streets while a simple instrumental song played. There were dance teams, conglomerates, community centers, and even a mascot for hand soap!

I made it a point to look for my students. I took lots of pictures and videos while I looked for them.

The dancers went for 3 rounds of dancing, and on the third round, I joined them! I was talking with a student on their break, and one of the men on the team asked if I wanted to join. The dance was simple enough to get the hang of after a few tries and it was really fun!

On Sunday, I went back to the same part of Sakaide to watch the mikoshi. Everyone was bouncing theirs up and down in tests of strength and it was quite exciting!


Because I had danced with a team of foreigners the day before, it helped me approach and get to know some exchange students. They were high schoolers from California, on a 10 day trip to Japan. I ended up talking with them for so long that I forgot to keep looking for my students!

At the end of the night, I decided that I would go around the food tents one last time and try some new things. A deep fried gyoza and a long octopus tentacle ended up being my dinner.

I can't wait to go to another festival!






  

This past week I must admit has been an emotional one. Saying goodbye to some of my students was absolutely heart wrenching. I know that I will see some of them again, but many of them I won't be able to see again and that makes me very sad. To those who I wasn't able to say it to, thank you. Thank you for sharing your time with Gem School and allowing me to be your teacher. Thank you for your kindness and trust in me as your teacher. Simply thank you. Some of you sent me home with parting gifts and I wanted to let you know how much I appreciated the gesture. A simple thank you doesn't amount to the gratitude I feel in the gifts you provided as well as your friendship. Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you! I will miss you all dearly and again, will have the joyous pleasure of seeing you all again in but a few months time.

Again, thank you!

Leigh   

Hello!

One of the things I think is the most important in the quest to learn English is reading, and understanding what you've read. Books and words are (as in Japanese) an intrical part of understanding the language. The words we use are developed from the words we read, whether through books, or even the signs and markers we use in everyday life. I remember some of the first words I could read where the road signs that indicated how far away the town I lived in was.

One of the best ways that I think early readers can develop and polish reading skills is through pictures books, which is universally accepted, but also using comics and graphic novels as ways to get older readers interested in learning and developing their ability to sight read. Graphic novels (or Manga here in Japan) use both narrative storytelling through the written word as well as visual imagery to tell a more complete story. Often the written aspects of the books are secondary to the images, but the images serve to drive the story forward as well. One of my favourite graphic novels is a book called Scott Pilgrim, which tells of a Canadian boy (Scott) who must fight the seven evil ex-boyfriends of his new love in order to prove that he is worthy. It's humorous, sweet, sad, and uplifting all at the same time, and it rekindled my love of reading after many years of not doing it. It's a series I would recommend to anyone who is looking to either polish their reading skills or is trying to encourage some one new to reading English to keep at it!  

Hello!

This week, I want to talk a little about a genre of music that is very dear to me, and is the one that I probably listen to the most often on a daily basis. It's a controversial type of music, and one that some people might not even think of music at all!

Mash-up has existed as a form of music since people have been able to play two pieces of music together at the same time. The theory is that one person can find two two pieces of music that have the same tempo, or the same musical structure, and they will “mash” together to form something new and distinct. This has been taken to great artistic heights in the last 15 years or so with the advent of new and greater musical technology, and software that can edit and manipulate music that are available to anyone with a mind to learning it.

Why this type of music is controversial is because if a person takes two songs that were written and produced by two (or more) different people, mashes them together to create something new, then decides to sell that music, the original writers and copy write owners of that music will no longer be getting money for something they've created. This has led to creators of mash-up music to effectively go “underground”, meaning that their music can only be released through digital downloads or to websites like Youtube for people to enjoy, rather than being able to sell the art they've worked so hard to create.

As someone who listens to this music, and has an interest in its continuing and flourishing, I don't agree that any artist is being infringed by having their music being turned into something new and different. If the mash-up artist has paid for the music that they are then manipulating, then there is no issue in my eyes. Manufacturers of paints and metals don't sue artists when they create paintings and sculptures, and I view music the same way that I view those. Mash-up is a fantastic style of music that allows you to re-imagine the music that you love in a new and different way, and can make music better and more dynamic than its original form.  

  

I love Karaoke! I cannot even explain how much I love karaoke! There are so many ways to do karaoke that it is always fresh and fun! You can have a raucous loud fun karaoke session with lots of people or you can do a more slow paced calm one with just a few people. Last Sunday I got to go to karaoke with a few of my friends and we had a lot of fun! I really want to go again soon with more people!

  

Lately I have been experiencing a huge increase in love for my kids. It is really amazing, I feel like I am a completely different person. I am happier than ever doing my job. Attached below is one of the many examples of how silly kids can be, these moments being the best parts of the job to share with these budding geniuses. This girl is in my favorite class, the one on Saturday that caps my week off in the best possible way. Really, you just want to be the best that you possibly can in front of these free-spirited kids who can find additional joy in the joy of laughing itself. Do you remember those moments of freedom or innocence and maybe fatigue, when you’re giggling at everything, even at the sound of your own giggle, so that one giggle just sets off another giggle, whether out of your own mouth or another’s, and an endless chain of giggles starts? My Saturdays are like that, with one kid goofing off with another kid and then I can’t help finding myself goofing off, too. In this particular instance, we were playing Red Light, Green Light, and the traffic monitor was calling out the pictured girl everytime she would look back on “Red light” but the monitor would call out the pictured girl no matter what, everytime, just because she felt like it. But no foul play went on, as we all were sharing in the laugh of this preposterous play! The girl pictured has been called out at least 10 tens by the time we found her laughing herself breathless under the chair, also for no reason. Really? What is she doing there? I have no idea, and that’s the beauty of it! Kids are like walking miracles, the impossible and unimaginable just happening for no reason at all. Having witnessed this magic of our children, how can anyone NOT want to teach children? It is absolutely essential in any society to take care of the kids.  

  

Hello, all!

My name's Matthew Fisher, and I'm very happy to be the newest member of Gem School's teaching staff! (Actually, I hear more new teachers are coming soon. But for now, I am the newest!) You can call me "Matt" if it's easier to say. "Matthew" is a hard name, but it has a very good meaning. It means, "Gift of God." Much too good for me!

Since this is my first post, I'll just introduce myself here. I'm from Minnesota, in the very middle and north of the United States.

The Canadian teachers say, "Ehh? You're almost Canadian!"

My mother and father are both university teachers. My father Barrett teaches English Literature and Film, both of which I also studied, and my mother Amy teaches Communication. Her specialty is Intercultural Communication, so my parents share many of my interests!

My younger sister Elspeth is an electroencephalographic technologist. I don't understand what she does, but I know she can read people's brains.

I love exploring new places, reading, meeting new people, watching movies, and cycling very long distances. Almost the first thing I did in Japan was to go to Saijo and buy a bicyle.

Normally I don't do poses. The person who sold me my bike said that I had to show my "gacchiri" spirit!

I have also lived in Tokyo and Matsumoto (both for a year and a half), in Tusuruoka, Yamagata (for only a couple of months), and overseas in Chungju, Korea (for one year). I've spent about a year traveling all over Europe (the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic) and of course I've been to Canada and China.

I've never been south of the Equator. I really want to "cross the line" someday!

Thanks for reading. Next time I'll tell you about some of my favorite places in Japan!

—Matthew  

  

Right now all the GEM School teachers and staff are very busy getting ready for Summer Tour! WE have all been working very hard to be able to have a fantastic event! For the past month and a bit, I have been sewing up a storm. I have been working very hard to sew something for Summer Tour, and I am very proud of it! I am very excited to be be able to show everyone what I have been so busy working on! I have really improved my sewing skills with this project, and I am very proud of what I have accomplished. I really hope that when it is finished it looks the way I see it in my head!