Where October went

Where did October go? It's suddenly gone, but what did I do with it...?

Ah, it's all coming back to me now. I saw the first weekend in with rafting, Iya Jazz, fun times at was-Katy's-but-is-now-Nate's house, a quick peek at Minoda-ren, and a visit to the Fuj on the way home. Lived up to all my birthday expectations and more. The Awa Connection general meeting on the Sunday night ran well, too, so it was a good start to the month.

The next weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th, a long one thanks to National Health and Sports Day, matched up pretty well, too. Osaka has a major festival every autumn down its main street, the Midosuji Parade. This year it fell on Sunday October 9 and my Awa Odori group got the call up to join in. We have an Osaka branch of the group, too, making it easy for us to gather some decent numbers, so off we went to Osaka. The plan was to visit Universal Studios Japan on the Saturday, have a fun night on the town that evening, and perform on the Sunday before trundling home. Sounded pretty straightforward.

I pulled up better than I thought I would the next day, getting up relatively early for a speech contest. Whereas in July I was actually contesting as a speaker, and then last month I was supporting my two junior high school girls for their speeches, this time I was sitting behind the judges' table for the prefectural senior high school contest. Although I've seen a few such contests in four years as a JET, I've never really been critical of the speeches as a member of the audience, just wanting to see the students (particularly mine) do well. Judging was a first for me and I was a bit nervous about it - the standard at senior high level was bound to be high and, therefore, the judges' job even tougher than usual, I thought. But having four other judges on the panel certainly helped, and though the standard was high, there were some truly outstanding speeches, so it ended up being not too difficult to sort the top few from the rest. In the end, it was a most enjoyable day - work on a holiday in one sense, but well worth it for the chance to hear the kids speak. I would've done it for free, but as they tend to do in Japan, they even paid me for my trouble. If I could judge speech contests every day of the year, I'd be doing even better than in my actual job!

I spent a good deal of the month working at my junior high school after a long stretch at elementary school. Nice to have a change of scene and there are a couple of students who are always happy to see me - perhaps a little too happy, but they're good kids, so it's okay. Most of the time was spent having meetings with the gaggle of English teachers to plan a demonstration class on October 21, having more meetings to change the plans we made in the last meeting, practicing with our second graders so that things would go off well, and finally getting over all the worries we had about the class when it was all finished at 5pm on the 21st. Poor Maeda-sensei, she was so stressed about it, and kept getting suggestions for changes from another senior teacher right up until the last minute. I have a few issues with the idea of a demo class as I've usually seen it executed over the past four years, but I hesitate to be too critical because I'm not a trained teacher of any sort, let alone one who is trained to know how things work in Japanese education. Suffice to say, though, that I think it's a bit of a manufactured education setting. I'd rather see really novel teaching methods or a "raw" classroom. For instance, we had an English teachers' conference just the next week, where the theme of the guest lecturer's presentation was evaluation strategies, like real-time evaluation. Seeing that sort of thing in a demonstration would be worthwhile.

Anyway, in spite of Maeda-sensei's stress, or perhaps because of it, the class ran well. There were maybe 30 teachers watching from the corridor and the back of the room, so it wasn't like some of the other demos I've seen with nearly 100 teachers surrounding a makeshift classroom in the gym or on a stage. The feedback afterwards was positive and, being a Friday, we all went away and had a good weekend. Mission accomplished. Sayonara demo classes? Fingers crossed.

Managed to fit in some touch footy this month. Despite the previous night's rain, we ran a small tournament on the 16th on a very muddy patch of turf just by the river. A couple of the local JET lads were having too much fun on Saturday night to believe that anyone would possibly be bothered getting up to play in that mudbath the next morning. Can't say I blame them, but play we did! The rain also worked to thwart our attempt this past Saturday 29th to put on a demonstration at a training college for disabled adults, but we just moved inside and downsized the demo a little, no worries!

For the first time on Japanese soil, I got some swing dancing in this month, too! After a bit of to-and-fro with the local JETs about a good time and place, we got just a handful of people together at the youth centre on Saturday night to try out some simple swing and have a little dance. For what it was, it went well! There is a small swing scene in Osaka, so maybe if we get a little more interest at our next such workshop, we can organise a trip up to Osaka to see what's happening.

A milestone worth noting, achieved last Friday, was my submission of the last assignment for the university course I've been taking this semester. I don't think it'll prove to be a Nobel Prize-winning contribution to the sum of human knowledge, but it's finished, and now I can focus on a bit of Japanese, phew!

I almost forgot yet another huge Awa Odori event that came by on October 23. What happened to the "off-season", eh? They certainly keep us busy in Tensui-ren. But this particular event only comes around once, well, EVER - the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Awa Odori Shinkou Kyoukai. Awa Odori itself is a tradition with more than 400 years of history, but it's fair to say that it has undergone some evolution in its modern era since the end of the Second World War. There have always been dancing groups, 'ren', but after the war, when Awa Odori started to be pushed as a means of reinvigorating the local community, some of these rens got together in formal associations, called 'kyoukai' in Japanese. There are a few of these around, but the two most significant - meaning, the two oldest, and also the two whose member groups are considered to be at the very top level of Awa Odori - are the Tokushima-ken Awa Odori Kyoukai and the aforementioned Shinkou Kyoukai. The 30 odd rens in these two associations are the groups that rotate through evening performances at the Awa Odori Museum every day. Tensui-ren has been around, in one form or another, for maybe 100 years, but has in the modern era been a member of the Shinkou Kyoukai.

So, to cut a long story short, the 50th anniversary was a cause for some celebration. In the morning we hosted a charity Awa Odori performance featuring all 16 rens - I don't know where the donations are going, but there were lots of people there, so I can only assume that some very deserving charity is going to be getting a nice little autumn bonus. Then, in the afternoon, in the presence of plenty of important people, we had a big party and put on another special combined performance. I thought, as I was listening to one of the many glowing speeches that were being made, that when I arrived in Japan five years ago, I never imagined that I would be able to be present at such a special occasion in Tokushima culture. Fifty years ago, I wonder if the people who founded the Shinkou Kyoukai looked forward to the day when they could mark such an occasion? I like to think that they did, if even only in wondering. Now I wonder if I'll get to mark the 60th anniversary, or even the 100th, myself.

Back to the present, of course this past weekend was Halloween, so foreigners of all sorts - and a few Japanese locals, too - were out in force and in costume on Saturday night. They all seemed to be gathered at the same place, which might be alright in your average pub back home, but proves a bit more challenging in Japan where most bars seat about a dozen people comfortably. There must have been over 60 people crammed into Ingrid's that night, costumes and all, so I'd had enough after about an hour. Yesterday afternoon saw me out at another Halloween event, but this one had a more family atmosphere and was organised by Awa Connection. Somewhere between the mosh pit at Ingrid's and the generally colder weather, I collected a nasty cold which floored me by the time I got home from the family fun. I turned up at work this morning, but when I heard that classes had been cancelled because my fellow teacher was absent, I took the hint and took the day off myself. So here I am, having spent the day convalescing and pottering about (as much as you can in a two-room flat), finally with some time to remember where October went. :)

Cheers, October, you were a good one!

Dave