I guess maybe this is time for some sort of reflection and comment on the whole year abroad experience so far. Trouble is, it hasn't all been gladness and light, which is quite extraordinarily in contrast to some Japanophiles I've met that tried making Japan out to be some sort of terrestrial paradise. I've had a pretty good time so far - see all the past blogging for details of most of it - but there's annoyingly been times I've also been pretty unhappy here, for a number of reasons which I think are important to mention if not only to give dispute to the strange army of blind (anime)Japan-lovers.
Nagoya is a fairly rigid place, in a variety of ways. I once had the thought that it lacks inspiration - the buildings and the streets all look the same, much to my annoyance when I take the subway to a new stop only to pop my head up and find it looks identical to all the others. Every street has at least a four-lane road in the middle, giving the whole place a very wide and spaced feeling, like you're not really a part of any of it. There are a couple of interesting narrower places, but they're at least a half hour subway ride away, while the local neighborhood is a little monotonous with a lot of rich private residences and the usual enormous roads everywhere. The more I travel elsewhere the more I realise just how strangely barren Nagoya seems in terms of visible life, expression and involvement. In other cities people even talk to each other on the trains. Although Tokyo is a strangely terrible place, it's still alive in one form or other. I'd hazard that Nagoya is actually pretty dead.
Regardless of the current locale, Japan is actually a pretty amazing place to be in, and I haven't a single regret about being in the country. It's still just as wacky, interesting and beautiful a place as you can imagine. So, there must be something up with what I've been doing in it - which is correct. The year abroad in Japan is meant to be the real boost for the language, the pressure, inspiration and kick to get you from the classroom second year to the advanced level you apparently need to pass the fourth year. So needless to say, I was looking for some sort of challenge and looking forward to really getting stuck into things.
Unfortunately I underestimated the Japanese teaching system. Having read (coincidently) a lot about it even in my first few weeks at Sheffield, I knew that university level is typically a lot more relaxed. Everything educational up to that point is intense pressure to try and get students through the difficult university entrance exams to a prestigious university, to the extent that Japanese people are much more impressed by where you are studying rather than what. Also, being foreign also places you well within the "foreign student" bubble which unfortunately effectively isolates you from any real sort of academic challenge, since of course we're all here to have a good time, not really caring about the work. The plus side to this is plenty of time to do what you want, but this doesn't always work, since as I mention below, so long as you look as if you're working then you're considered working, no matter of the utility of what you're actually doing.
The other main downfall is textbooks - while the course in Sheffield is wonderfully flexible and can turn on a sixpence, having been hand-forged by the teachers themselves, Japanese courses tend to rely on a single textbook, and the lessons closely involve moving at whatever pace through it. This has been carried out to extremes - one whole chapter was dedicated to a relatively simple grammar point, which was covered ad nauseam for several lessons while other more challenging parts of the language were either ignored or skimmed over. For example, the textbook gave good examples of discussions or presentations about certain topics, which if we recreated would have been not half-bad practice of the language, but which were instead on the whole ignored in favour of some trifling structural point found midway through.
I understand that this is largely a problem of balancing - some classmates were of higher levels, and some were of lower, and some teaching points would be useful to different parts of the class. I would say it shows well the excellent standard of teaching we have in Sheffield that the vast majority of the "Upper Intensive Intermediate Course" had already been covered. But the fact there were several fluent students in the same class (Chinese and Korean, so a small head start perhaps) makes me wonder how they coped without going completely bonkers. The main disadvantage is not that the utility of the content varied wildly, more that the time spent on it (3 hours every morning, followed by copy-from-the-textbook homework, organising simple group presentations etc) meant that by the time you were finished with the necessary bits you had no real enthusiasm to try and work with something useful by yourself, eventually killing off most self-study I had told myself I would do, including the other half of this blog (in Japanese).
The other thing to try and drag the mood down is the complete change of lifestyle. In Sheffield I was an active member of multiple clubs and societies, always with something to do and with work and socialising on top came to a fairly decent way of going about things. In Japan, being refused entry into the two clubs I had been interested in joining kind of killed off hope for that aspect fairly quickly, giving a distinct lack of things to try and take my mind off the large amount of time I was spending on dubious language instruction and associated homework. Socialising of course carried on, though there's a limit to how happy you can be simply going out and drinking as opposed to the backstage, student journalism and Japan Soc treasuring I was busying myself with before.
Phew.
So, time for plan B. I'm off on a ten day holiday at the end of the week taking me all around Japan in quite a streched manner (Sapporo in the far north, then Tokyo centrally, then Hiroshima in the west) which will give another great break and fresh views into the country I'm staying in rather than the city/district/university bubble. When I get back, I have a couple of other excursions to plan, and a lot of free time entirely up to me to fill. So, some resolutions for next semester, and perhaps the holiday too:
1) Escape university. If the university can't offer me what I would like, then it's time to cut down to the bare necessities with that part of life and use the liberated time trying to make it by myself. That said, I'm still enthusiastic and optimistic about the different lessons and courses open to me next semester, so I will wait and see to what extent this becomes necessary.
2) Get a job. The exchange rate is terrible with the UK pound, around 130 when normally it's 200, meaning using money from UK bank accounts is almost a non-option. However, getting a medium to low paid job here means high earnings when I get back to the UK, and is also good experience and a way to accomplish number 1.
3) More self-study. Translation has always been a good hobby of mine, and I'm already racing through my second film. This is good language practice, and also a fair extra-curricular thing to be getting on with.
4) Write a Japanese sakubun at least once every two weeks. This is a biggie - with no writing or kanji learning encouraged at Nagoya, my whole writing skill has effectively gone down the drain. This is part of the self-learning effort I'm going to try and put in, the other being
5) Move to the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Level 1 kanji. Level two isn't perfect for me just yet, but it's good enough that I need the next level to remind me I still know nothing about the things.
6) Take the JLPT Level 2 test this year in July. 2009 is the first year that they've started the level 1 and 2 tests twice a year rather than the previous once in December, and I think I can definitely get to that standard by that time. Maybe that will give me a year to improve by one level and take the next in July 2010, but that might be a bit too ambitious.
7) Try and join a theatre club. I've been pointed towards one, and will contact them and see where that goes. Having discovered that I can get to the main station by bike in under an hour (far far away on the other side of the city) transportation is no longer a real problem. Will be interesting how this one goes. Failing this I'll try again at the university clubs, since it's a new academic year for them and they might be more recipient to new people, though being foreign still counts horribly against you.
That's the plan. Now to see if I can keep to it.
Though for now, I'm off on holiday. At last.
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