Party Time! Excellent!

On a night usually spent enjoying the company of family in the warmth and hospitality of my grandparent's house, I was in Japan celebrating the end of the year with my co-workers at the annual "bounenkai" (忘年会). The Chinese characters in the word literally mean, in this order, "forget", "year", and "meeting". In other words, it's a party to forget the past year in order to ring in the new one. Since each school will have their own, assistant language teachers who teach at more than one school have a pretty busy (and expensive) couple of weeks ahead of them if they choose to go to all of them. Thankfully, I only had one for my middle school and one for my elementary school.

Popular venues for bounenkai's usually amount to large "ryokan" (旅館), or traditional Japanese

hotels. Since all schools in the immediate area hold their parties around the same time, the competition to reserve one of these places is pretty fierce. The fees per person can get pricey ranging from 5,000 - 6,000 yen and up (about 50-60 dollars). As traditional establishments, ladies dressed in kimonos greet you at the door to check your shoes (which you are required to take off) and guide you to your reserved meeting room. The room itself is a huge tatami (straw mats) room with low food trays and seat cushions lined up around the room.

There will usually be some traditional Japanese art behind the main row at the far end of the room where the higher-ups sit.

Your tray will already be loaded with food when you get there, but don't eat yet! After the bounenkai formally starts, there will be a few words from the principal. Everyone will then pour drinks for each other (never pour your own drink) for a "kampai"(乾杯), or toast. Then the eating begins.

During the 3+ hour duration of the party, kimono-clad ladies will continuously clear your dishes to make room for more and more food. It seems like a lot, but the portions tend to be small. If your drink gets low, don't worry- your neighbor will fill it up for you (and it's expected you will do the same for them).

The brown, ceramic-looking thing in the upper-right is actually a little pot set on top of a candle burner. At the start of things, the waitresses will come around and light your candle to start boiling
whatever's in the bowl on top.

Throughout the night, people will come sit in front of your tray to talk to you and fill up your glass and have their's filled in return. You'll probably hear the phrase, "What are you drinking?" about a hundred times before the night is over.

Next order of business is some sort of presentation of the year's top ten "big news" items. These can range from huge victories at competitions to recent marriages to snakes being found in the school entrance (unfortunately, I didn't get to see said snake...). A person related to each news item will make a short speech and recieve a small gift.

After another brief pause for socializing, a series of games begin. People are divided into teams depending on where you sit and either entire teams participate or select a member for each round.
Games can be just about anything, but here are the ones I got to play:

Hirasawa Elementary School Bounenkai:

Bingo- self-explanitory. Each bingo you got earned points for your team.

心の一つ (kokoro no hitotsu/ "one heart")　Each team recieves a laminated piece of paper and a marker. The MC will name something and end it with ～と言えば (...toh iebah/"Speaking of..."). For example, they might say, "speaking of mom's home cooking" or "speaking of sushi filling". Then each team member must write down an example of or something related to the theme without looking at each other's answers. When they've finished, the team will line up in a row facing the audience and reveal their answers at the same time. The team will then recieve points based on how many answers are the same. In other words, the team must become "one heart".


Nikaho Junior High School Bounenkai:


一流 (ichiryuu/"high-end" or "top rank") Each team selects a member to participate each round (we had four rounds). In each round, the participants are given two of the same food or beverage samples. However, one will be a generic brand and the other will be a fancy, high-end brand and each participant must guess which is which.


Gesture Roulette- pretty self-explanitory except when a gesture is guessed correctly, the gesturing person goes to the back of the line and the person at the front does the next gesture. Try to guess as many gestures as a team in one minute. This can get pretty silly with alcohol consumption (which there was plenty).

J-Song (Japanese song) Each group selects a singer who will recieve a list of songs to sing the melodies to (lyrics not required). The group must guess as many songs as they can within a time limit.

For some reason I didn't pick up, one team got penalized and each member had to recite a Japanese tongue twister. My JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) got "Boku Bobu"- literally "I'm Bob."

After all games have been played, points are tallied up and groups come up to receive their prizes. Everyone gets a prize; the games just denote who gets first pick.

If the reserved time is up, then closing words are spoken and the party comes to an end. Usually there will be a 二次会 (nijikai/ literally a "second meeting"). These after-parties are optional and usually have karaoke involved. People take taxis there and back.

While expensive, I think it's well worth the food, hospitality, and activities. You'll also get to interact with your co-workers in ways you can't in the everyday workplace. Japan being Japan, teachers work insane hours and are busy people. It's no wonder why they take the time to drink and unwind from a busy year and celebrate their accomplishments. ALT's, don't miss this opportunity to participate in a part of Japanese culture rarely seen by anyone else.

Cultural Perspective 2: Electric Boogaloo

I learned a very obvious thing after spending some time here. It's one of those things you've known your whole life, but can only truly understand after having experienced it. It's pretty simple: people are still people. Specifically, people that are foreign to you are still people.

Duh, right? Most of us are taught from an early age that people are people no matter where they come from. You've seen many on TV or even in real life. When you bump into someone on the street and exchange pleasantries, there's nothing strange or odd about it whether they're from here or there. It doesn't even matter if they speak English or not.

Or does it? Perhaps if you're in the states, speak native English and are surrounded by people speaking English. If you're in a familiar, comfortable environment and have no problems communicating in the dominant language, then the other person is obviously just some guy who bumped into you on the street. However, even if you parted on pleasant terms and you thought they were nice people, subconsciously in your brain, they were the nice Japanese or Indian or [insert ethnicity here] person you met on the street. We place these labels and their corresponding meaning on people without even thinking about it and put them in a group somewhere outside the social norm.

And what about the other guy? If he doesn't speak English well or quite know how to handle the current situation, how is he perceiving you? Even if they could sense your good intentions, you're also a source of anxiety. When you're in the extreme minority surrounded by people that don't understand and can't communicate with you, every interaction is terrifying.

Nobody can ever completely understand this unless they spend a substantial amount of time in another country. And I mean among the natives. None of this hanging around English speakers and westerners stuff. I'm a shy person to begin with, but then I went to Tokyo. There was a whole week I remember vividly in October of that year in which I didn't want to go anywhere (yep, a huge part of culture shock). For that whole week dragging myself to school was a chore because I knew that every minute I spent outside my apartment there was a chance I'd have to interact with someone. This wasn't because I didn't want to improve my Japanese. The fear was the possibility (perceived as high in my mind) that I wouldn't be able to achieve communication and in the end I'd be that weird foreigner that can't speak Japanese well. In that situation, I was that foreign person you bumped into on the street. I was a completely surrounded by a sea of well-intentioned people that couldn't possibly know or understand me. Communication is one of those invisible things we take for granted all the time, but would be screwed without (for a great read on this topic, I highly recommend Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson).

I don't know where I'd be now without that experience. I still have my share of difficulties and in some ways they're a bit grander in scale because there are few non-Japanese here and as a long-term resident with a job, I'm no longer the super-special student that's going to leave in a few months and never come back. Now, integration is key because the long-term effects of isolation can be disastrous (new ALT's, look forward to the speech from a former JET who new a fellow JET that went so crazy he ate paper in front of him...). This is now my life, not a vacation. It's my first-ever career and I hadn't worked with children in a long time.

When I first started, there was the usual wide-eyed fascination from students and teachers alike, but eventually it led to me developing the whole "stranger in a strange land" feeling all over again. They were strange, Japanese children who didn't (and in some cases didn't want to) understand me. Every day I felt a bit of apprehension when interacting with them.

Then one day, in one of my first-year classes, watching my students joke around and laugh, something clicked in my brain: they're all just kids. They love to laugh and have fun. They're snarky and clever. They each have something unique about them (which also helps me memorize names). The more time I spend with the them, the more the "they all look the same" cliche melts away. I was amazed just how much I was putting them in the outside "other" category without meaning too and they were probably doing the same to me. Every day I can feel the distance closing between us. This growing understanding not only makes life easier, it's also liberating.

It's the whole "this is my life" mentality that helped me with the integration. This is my apartment, this is my city, this is my office, this is my school, and now, these are MY students. There are still some that aren't so forthcoming, but now there is more understanding and I know how to interact with them.

I'd be very interested to learn why we put up these subconscious barriers between us. The phenomenon definitely isn't limited to culture and ethnicity. It's simply a reaction to those who are "different"- people that don't fit our mental structure of what is "normal". Perhaps it aided in survival to label people and make sure they were part of your social group.

No matter what the cause, I've learned that the most effective cure is spending a lot of time in foreign situations and with foreign people. I think this is one of if not the most important change in worldview. I'd like to think most people are decent human beings that don't want to build walls between them and other people, but there are way too many that deliberately ostracize people of other genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations and fervently insist they're not bigoted or racist. They are the ones who need this change more than anyone. Spending time with others forces you to build a sense of empathy for them which in turn results in understanding.

I think this experience will continue to have a positive effect on how I interact with other people who are "foreign" to me. In fact, I think this is part of the purpose of the JET program and ALT's in general. Maybe this is the "internationalization" that they're so adamant about. I firmly believe this is a major life change that everybody should experience at least once in their lifetime. Many people think all college students should be required to go abroad at least once and I agree. With globalization moving faster and faster, we're going to need to start realizing that at the end of the day, "people are people".