The last voyage of the Thunder-child

Phew, it's been a busy old week bat-fans!

I've had dinner at a Professor's house, eaten blowfish (fugu) been to Nara and said good-byes to several students. Tonight, I'm saying my final farewells before I go to Sendai tomorrow.

Welcome to cool Japan, indeed!

Last Saturday night I had a bit of a get together for some of my students. We went to one of the local British pubs, the Pig and Whistle, then went onto a small izakaya (Japanese style pub) for food and a few drinks. Oh, so drunk....

Keiichi, Sanae and me, Megan is in the background.

Tom and Chie

Tomoko and I

So, on Thursday I went to Nara. Despite having lived in Osaka for a year it was my first time to go. The top picture was taken in Nara. I love the sign in the window - "welcome to cool Japan".
Nara has a very different feel to Kyoto, although I was only there for a short time.

Shika.
Cannibalistic deer like these two are especially rare.

Todai-tera (temple)
Not Tokyo University.

Bhudda.
His constant chargrin whilst buying sneakers made him very philosophical.

Nara is, like Kyoto, also a former capital of Japan. Indeed, Nara was the first permanent capital. However, it retained this status for only 75 years. After one of the clergy seduced a member of the royal court the Emperor wisely decided to move the capital to Kyoto. Probably, he did some rather nasty things to the clergy-man too, although I don't quite know what...

Zou Lei and some random guy

Part of my blog has to be dedicated to my friend Zou Lei. Lei and I used to work on night shift at Nova together. Strangely, we never really got to know each other then, but only latterly whilst working at new Nova. Indeed, this blog owes its name to Zou Lei. It was her who translated my name, Louis, phonetically into Chinese (lu-i-su), complete with Kanji. The kanji for my name basically mean "The easy road" "The easy way" or "The easy path". I rather liked this. My kanji in Japanese can mean "Shiny blue thing" or "Long stay in a bird house"!!

Sakuras and Sayonaras

First, an apology. My writing style is not normally so poor. As well as being a published scientist, I've worked as a language teacher for the last year, and I also have a sideline in proofreading manuscripts. I know how to write in a concise, erudite manner - I'm just not doing it here. Yet.

The reason is simply one of economy of words. To understand everything I want to talk about here, a huge amount of background is required. Were I to go through everything fully and completely, you'd still be reading the background material long after I've moved to Sendai. I want to cover it quickly, and get onto a more day-to-day feel to my blog.

Sakuras
Sakura festivals are very popular in Japan. Sakura is the Japanese word for the cherry blossum. Every March through May people in different parts of Japan (first in the South, where the blossums open first, then progressively further North to Hokkaido last) troop down to the park with a picnic and (normally) copious amounts of alcohol. They proceed to "view" the sakura, or as we'd say in Scotland "get tanked up".

Sakura at Maruyama park

On Friday, I visited Kyoto. Kyoto is, as all Japanese will tell you, a beautiful place. My old digital camera suffered a cruel and unusual fate recently, so I decided to purchase its replacement, a Pentax Optio S10, which I'd thoroughly recommend. Even an idiot schmuck like me can produce reasonable images very easily, and the night mode is really good. At a whopping 10 megapixels the images are really good, but require cropping for use on a blog, for example.

A Kyoto Temple

Kyoto used to be the Japanese capital until the Meiji restoration, where the Emperor wrestled command of Japan and her armies from the Shogunate, or military leaders. Upon reasserting his control of Japan, Meiji moved the capital of Japan to Edo, what we now call Tokyo.

Another Kyoto temple

Kyoto in many respects was lucky. It was the initial choice for the dropping of the bomb in WWII. Kyoto was regarded by the US military leadership as an intellectual capital, where the inhabitants would be able to most fully understand the implications of the bomb. Likewise, Kyoto was judged to be "just the right size" [for complete destruction]. Of course, a major reason for dropping the bomb, not publicly stated, but privately held by the military leadership was a demonstration of power against Russia. Kyoto escaped thanks to a last minute reprieve by the Secretary of War, who realised that the destruction of Kyoto would be the greatest psychological blow to the Japanese, and would lead only to continued animosity with the West, rather than facilitating peace.

Maruyama Koen (park)

And Sayonaras

And this weekend has been a hard one. Emotional, even. I have many private students, and for many this has been their last lessons with me. I plan to talk about them all, over time, but I'll go through one at a time. Today, I'm going to talk about Keizo Uno.

Keizo, Hiroki (8), Kazuki (5) and me (28)

Keizo is one of my favourite students. Of course, I really like all my students, but I've always enjoyed teaching Keizo. Of course, I say "teach", but I've never really tried to teach Keizo. We hang out and have lunch. His wife (below) is an excellent cook! When I first met Keizo he'd been studying English for about a year under another teacher. The other teacher had used the workbook approach which I shun so heavily. Language is dynamic, and learning it is about the experience. Keizo has come a long way, from single words to relatively complex conversations with me in the last 5 months. Keizo's kids are pretty cool too - Hiroki always has a question for me at the end of the lesson, and Kazuki has been endeavouring to teach me kanji and magic! I'll miss these guys.

A bit about my life

I currently live in Osaka, Japan. I came here on May 8th last year. There is a story about my arrival here, but suffice to say for the moment I came to work for the ill-fated English conversation school, Nova. Nova went bankrupt later in the year, leaving me high and dry with no savings and huge debts to pay. Still, I decided to stick Japan out, as I was awaiting news of some funding for a scientific project that I had applied for. I later got the funding, but short term work was hard to come by. The short term solution was obvious however; private students.

Like any venture, it started slowly, with only a small number, but within a couple of months, I was teaching 30 lessons a week, essentially a full load. Nova was taken over by a new company - G-communication (although "NO-communication" might be a better name), and I got my full time job back. My work load would have to be 'rationalised'. I retained 22 private students - essentially the ones I couldn't, or didn't want to, say no to. Lovely people.


This week is a strange, cruel and horrible one. Next week I start my new job as a scientist working at Tohoku University in Sendai. So I must leave Osaka, and my private students.
Many farewell parties, and many sad goodbyes. Tonight I had a last lesson with my youngest (and coolest) student, Ryosuke. He obviously didn't enjoy tonight's lesson, and I got sent packing!! Seriously though, they gave me a beautiful pen, which I love already!

So this blog is essentially for those students. They can see what I get up to, and I'll try with some type of regularity to update this with pretty pictures and all.

Hello World!

Third time lucky.

This is the third blog I've set up, run for a while and subsequently quit. But this time I'm going to be more focussed. Promise.

My goal with this blog is simple. To keep a diary of what's happening in my life for my friends, to explain and explore my time in Japan, and to serve as a place for me to come to contemplate my life and make sense of it all. Hopefully, we'll have some fun too.