Gakusei (Students)

I love my students.

Takuya

Takuya is a young man who had trouble with the “real life” situations in which he was supposed to use difficult grammar. (These are difficult tasks. I mean, you try using the agentless passive on command to talk about buying and selling at flea markets. Honto ni, this is one of the “real life” situations that one of The Kaisha textbooks uses.) One night, a typhoon kept many students home. Takuya was the only student who showed up for the lesson. We sat down and I began by asking him about himself. He explained, in remarkably fluent English, that having a new teacher was difficult and then he went on to explain his research in programming computers for sound recognition.

Takuya is in Germany at the moment, working in a lab in Hamburg. Just before he left, he came wearing a very cool looking pair of glasses. He normally wears contact lenses, and I commented, “I like your glasses. They make you look very intelligent!” He said, “I bought them to look more intelligent.”

He also told me, weeks ago, when I asked him about typhoons, after much explanation about how it was wrong to laugh at this, but that he really found it funny that news reporters were sent out to the windiest places to report on the incoming typhoons. I told him that I used to love this too, found it hilarious in New Mexico, when reporters would be sent out to the middle of nowhere to the place where, just hours ago, it had snowed.

Akira

I’ve written about Akira before. He is the salaryman that I walked over to in The Kaisha lobby to talk to because he was the most handsome man in the room, albeit about a half a foot shorter than I am. (Height is something that one cannot, in this country, be too terribly picky about.) He turned out to be remarkably fluent because he works for a Canadian company’s Japanese branch office. He is responsible for the technical design aspects of helicopter parts and often has to speak to Canadian technicians on the phone in English.

Akira has these wonderful stories about his childhood. One (that I’ve written about) is of when he accidentally set fire to a tree with some fireworks. He also told me that he wanted, as a child, to be an explorer in the Antarctic.

One night, we talked about an article in a text based on CNN stories. The article was about banning “sexy cheerleading” in Texas. I asked him about his views of sexy cheerleading and laughingly said that he was all for it. I asked him if he had a daughter. He said he did. I asked her age. “She is fourteen,” he said. I held up the text, with a picture of a teenager in short shorts and a tight t-shirt hopping around showing her pom-poms. “What would you say if this were your daughter?” I asked. He replied, “She is not allowed.”

Atsuko

Atsuko is a cute 30-year-old, and you’d mistake her for nothing more until you talk to her and find out that, not only does she run marathons, she also owns her own business. Atsuko’s father is a monk, her family’s home is a temple. For holidays, she travels home to help her family with the visitors who pack the temple.

She is the one who explained to me that there are many, many bald Japanese men. I said, “I never see any!” She replied, “They’re all wearing wigs.” I taught her the word toupee, then I asked her if she could tell when a man was wearing a toupee. She said, “Of course.” I said, “I can’t tell.” She replied laughingly, “Japanese technology is very good.”

Goru

Goru is one of Ben’s students. I know him because I took over one of Ben’s Saturday classes weeks ago and taught Goru the English for “breast feeding.”

Huh?

Oh, so, the lesson was about how to make small talk. I gave a group of three men a situation: Please sit on this park bench and talk about the baby that one of you is holding. The class loved that three men had to do this. I ended the lesson by having everyone present them to the class as little skits.

The three men milled about uncomfortably. One asked, “Do you want a baby?” Goru replied, “I don’t want your baby.”

Goru said to me, during practice, "I actually have a baby." I asked him what kinds of questions people asked him about his baby, and he said he didn't know the words. He mimed holding a baby up to his breast. "Do you feed it by--?" I said, "Ohhh!" and taught him the word "breast-fed." (As an aside: I recently learned that the Spanish chi-chi is also slang for breasts here, probably introduced through the Portugese.)

Goru is hip as hell and speaks relatively fluent English with this very bored German-accented voice. On Saturdays, he takes three of Ben’s lessons in a row. Ben asked him one Saturday, “Aren’t you sick of me after three lessons?” Goru replied, “I’m sick of you after the first lesson.”

They're fabulous, they are. I am grateful for each and every one of them.