Today I experienced my first real bout of culture shock in Japan. I don’t mean the sensation where you just feel out of place, and everything is a little odd. I mean the feeling where alarm bells start screaming “WRONG!” in your head. It just felt so wrong, and I didn’t like it. I taught at Uenohara elementary school today, and it is often customary for the teachers to eat with the students, as a way of harboring good relations between teachers and students. This school has one cafeteria where all 600 students eat at the same time. As soon as I walked into the cafeteria a huge wall of wrong hit me. The entire room was silent. Not a single child was talking. They were all eating as quickly and quietly as they could. In a room full of hundreds of children there was no mirth. The worst part was when one of the 1styear students spilled her milk on her lap; for a good 5 minutes the only sound in the room was the sound of that girl crying. It just felt so wrong to me. I see the merit of having order in the lunchroom, but the whole situation felt so inorganic. At the end of the lunch there was a ritualized cleaning of the whole cafeteria, all the dishes were stacked, all the tables were washed, and the floors were scrubbed, all in complete silence. I felt like there was something terribly wrong. What must have happened to these children to make them not act like children?
Culture shock is a weird phenomenon; it absolutely defies reason. Every sensible aspect of my brain sees the merit in that system, but it still rubs me wrong.
Ben and I cooked our first dinner in our house. It was delicious. We made a stew, a salad, and rice. We ate it on our brand new table. Though please don’t look too hard at our table… it will start to look remarkably like a cardboard box.
I remember the first night of our family at an apartment at Bear Creek.
ReplyDeleteWe used suitcases as our dinner tables, because it was not furnished yet.
Have fun!
Haha, that's a great idea too! With a little imagination, anything can be furniture.
DeleteWe're really enjoying ourselves, though I think it might be awkward to have guests over.
-Katie
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ReplyDeleteTom here on Jerri Jo's computer. Can you imagine what it might be like for a Japanese person visiting an American inner-city school cafeteria for the first time? Culture shock in spades I would think. Perhaps the Japanese have become very strict in their enforcement of order to avoid the kind of chaos and lack of respect we often seem to put up with either out of fear, apathy or resignation. At least the Japanese have not given up on a large segment of their youth population.
ReplyDeleteHi Tom,
DeleteI'm sure Japanese would think our lunches are absolutely insane. I think they would also be appalled by the lunches served. Lunches here are very healthy. A lot of vegetables!
Teachers really respect their students here, I really like that aspect. They expect a lot out of the students, and the teachers also really pay attention to unique learning habits of different students.
It's really great to hear from you!
-Katie